“Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty… I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.” ― Theodore Roosevelt On July…
Synthetic Monitoring is a methodology of actively probing servers, services, and applications by simulating an end user. Blackbox, aka Active, aka Proactive, aka Synthetic methodology emulates an action and performs a functional test without really worrying about the internal inner workings, very much like an end user (“I am here…
Today’s business landscape is increasingly competitive, demanding that companies maintain an agile mindset when differentiating their products and services from competing brands. For many organizations, this differentiation comes in the form of better user engagement strategies designed to improve the availability and reliability of web services and applications. But while…
DevOps is a practice that helps teams continuously create, refine, and improve. DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE) teams must constantly hone and enhance the systems and software they are responsible for. This includes taking a clear-eyed and honest look at how technology and culture choices impact their practice. Teams…
Recently, I was visiting a large media company who, a short time ago, moved their entire infrastructure to Google Cloud. The dev team were pushing for an APM solution and were looking at all the usual suspects: Dynatrace, AppD, New Relic, Datadog… all great choices! The discussion that followed is…
While catching up on emails this weekend, I ran into a problem—a link in one of the messages ruined my Sunday and almost ruined my professional reputation. I clicked on the link. Nothing. Refreshed the page. Nothing. Tried a different browser. No joy. Changed my ISP. Nothing. Changed DNS providers.…
Fueled by Digital Transformation, enterprises today are technology companies, whether or not they call themselves such. Enterprises rely on complex sites and apps to sell their products. Nike is a technology company that sells sporting goods. Ikea is a technology company that sells furniture. Digital Transformation is also changing traditional…
In 2013 after a debate with a CMO I wrote this blog post where I made the case that Performance was the 5th P of the modern marketing mix and IT telemetry is not just for IT. Fast forward six years, it is clear that the performance of a web…
CenturyLink Outage 911: UPDATE Dec 28, 2018 The CenturyLink outage affected 911 services in Washington state, Missouri, Idaho, and Arizona. People report receiving busy dial tones when trying to call 911. CenturyLink tweeted about “additional technical problems” around 6:30 a.m. EST. Residents of these areas also report receiving mobile phone alerts about…
The shift to SaaS and cloud comes with many monitoring challenges. Complex systems and hybrid cloud environments, full of first and third-party components, require robust monitoring solutions. Salesforce is the epitome of a modern, complex application. It’s a web of cloud, third-party, and self-owned systems. Plus, it’s a business-critical application…
