Take some time away from your desk, grab a bite to eat, and explore what our authors have been covering in blog posts for the past week.
Cloud Data Warehouse: What Is It and What Are Some Examples?
In the twenty-first century, data is the new gold. Almost all (successful) companies rely on data to grow. Understanding and adapting to clients’ needs are the most direct ways to increase sales. The bigger the company, however, the more data that needs to be processed in order to have that understanding. That’s where data warehouse systems come into play. In this post, you’ll learn what exactly cloud data warehouses are and some examples of them. Find out more from Dawid Ziolkowski on Scalyr’s blog.
Traps to Avoid When Setting Up PHP for Heroku
PHP powers millions of applications. This massive success is due to PHP’s simplicity, clear documentation, and tons of free resources. The PHP community provides an incredible ecosystem of libraries and tools, enabling anyone to develop production-grade apps rapidly. What’s even more exciting is PHP projects are cheap to host and widely supported by many platform providers such as Heroku. Learn more from Samuel James on Solarwinds’ blog.
.NET Logging Best Practices and Tools
Is your organization looking for a better way to log? Unfortunately, logging comes with several challenges. Especially when logs pile up with an immense amount of data. This makes extracting key metrics difficult without the right tools. Therefore, it’s vital one has an organized logging practice. Today we’re taking a look at .NET logging. Find out more about it from Daniel de Oliveira on DNS Stuff’s blog.
Most Important Server Monitoring Metrics to Consider
Server monitoring starts with collecting data (such as error rates or CPU usage), and analyzing this data can help you determine the health and performance of your IT services. Your DevOps team can analyze these metrics to shift from reactive to proactive monitoring. Instead of waiting for a problem to occur, you can create alerts to warn you when an anomaly is detected, helping you prevent problems before they occur. Learn more about server monitoring from Michiel Mulders on DNS Stuff’s blog.
How to Tail Kubernetes (and kubectl) Logs
So, you have a Kubernetes cluster. Let’s make sure you know how to see what’s going on inside. In this blog post, you’ll learn how to review logs from Kubernetes and what you may want to be running in it. Find out more from Erik Lindblom on DNS Stuff’s blog.
Best Tools for Azure Monitoring and Performance Testing
When hosting infrastructure using Microsoft Azure, it’s important to understand what tools can help. Especially if unforeseen issues start to arise, it’s key to have the ability to quickly diagnose issues with concrete data to find a solution. Without this in place, you may find yourself in a situation where you’re running into hard-to-diagnose problems. Whether you’re finding yourself in this situation already or are looking to get ahead, finding a good monitoring and performance testing tool is key. Dave Farinelli can help you out on TEK-Tools’ blog.
Web App Analytics With APM: Top Insights to Analyze
The term web app analytics means keeping tabs on the various metrics that determine the well-being of a system. These analytics help you gain insight into why and how a system slows down. As much as we hate for it to happen, some downtime is almost guaranteed. However, the amount of downtime your system faces is mostly up to you. If you’ve got your finger on the right pulse points, you should be able to reduce the amount of time your application or applications are unavailable. An APM (application performance monitoring) tool helps you manage these pulse points for insights. Learn all about it from Leo Gwangwadza on TEK-Tools’ blog.
IIS Log Analysis – Best Tools and Practices
When you host applications on Microsoft web server technology Internet Information Services (IIS), your system administrators must carry out the ongoing task of IIS log analysis. This means they monitor the variables indicating whether IIS-hosted applications are running at optimal performance. You can also use IIS logs to check the security and integrity of said applications. When IIS was released back in 1995, it came with a log tracker that stored data in .txt format. It still does. However, reading through a thousand lines of text looking for diagnostic data is a tedious task. This brought about the need for third-party IIS log analysis tools. In this post, we showcase some of these tools, along with best practices to help you keep an analytical eye on IIS logs. Check it out from Leo Gwangwadza on TEK-Tools’ blog.
React Logging and Error Handling Best Practices
Logging is essential for understanding what’s happening within your running code. Furthermore, you can use log data to track various metrics such as HTTP error rates, failed login attempts, and overall application availability. That’s not all, though. Log aggregation platforms allow for log analysis and the creation of advanced alerting mechanisms to detect anomalies. For example, a high number of failed login attempts might indicate someone tried to gain illicit access to your application. Learn more about react logging from Michiel Mulders on TEK-Tools’ blog.
Python Syslog – How to Set Up and Troubleshoot
Logging is one of your most important means for monitoring what’s going on inside your code. Everything, even the most trivial script, should communicate what’s happening inside. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to make those scripts write to your system logs: Python Syslog. With Python’s native syslog support, you can add system logging to your scripts with just a few lines of code, replace printing to the console, and redirecting to files with powerful tooling that works with syslog, rsyslog, syslog-ng, and of course, SolarWinds® Loggly®. Eric Goebelbecker can fill you in on Solarwinds’ blog.
Rsyslog: Manual Configuration and Troubleshooting
The BSD Syslog standard has been with us for a long time, and even with the advent of journald, it’s here to stay. Rsyslog logs messages to the network or to local disk with high performance. And, its client-server architecture and multithreaded architecture make it easy to scale your logging infrastructure. It’s one of the most robust implementations of syslog available on Linux. Learn more from Eric Goebelbecker on Solarwinds’ blog.
Syslog-ng Configuration and Troubleshooting Tips
Syslog-ng is a system logging application. It provides logical separation between applications and their log messages, so they can simply “fire and forget” log messages to a centralized process for reporting, analysis, and storage. In this post, you’ll learn the basics of syslog-ng configuration. We’ll cover how to install, configure, and test syslog-ng on your Linux system. Check it out in this post from Eric Goebelbecker on Solarwinds’ blog.
The Pros and Cons of Test Data Synthetics (or Data Fabrication)
Data privacy is one of the most pressing issues in the new digital era. Data holds so much value for normal internet users and for all types of companies that are looking to capitalize on this new resource. To keep data anonymous and private, two types of solutions present themselves: masked data or synthetic data. Learn more on Enov8’s blog from Louay Hazami.
Examples and Types: A Definition of Business Transformation
With technologies and businesses evolving at the speed of light, we’re witnessing a new era of business transformation. New technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are now more available than ever to small businesses. This allows them to become increasingly competitive with larger companies. However, simply incorporating new technologies won’t give you a major competitive edge. Instead, the new point of focus is customer obsession or customer centricity. Michiel Mulders can fill you in on Plutora’s blog.
Process Improvement: The Leader’s Manual for How to Achieve It
Just being a software engineering company isn’t enough nowadays. You need to be a high performing software company. But organizations often struggle to implement changes that improve their processes. Your goal is to deliver better or higher customer value utilizing less time and money. It’s not an easy task to improve customer value with fewer resources. There are many different approaches to process improvement that companies can adopt. Some popular methodologies include Kanban, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), and Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA). Learn more from Michiel Mulders on Plutora’s blog.
Digital Transformation in Depth: A Savvy Leader’s Guide
Over the past decade, the term digital transformation has become a familiar buzzword, especially for “traditional” businesses. With cutthroat disruption from new technologies-based start-ups, businesses have been looking at digital transformation as some sort of panacea. The late adopters and the skeptics often pose the dilemma of deploying digital transformation to drive their business strategies and functions. However, most of us understand very little about what it really entails when it comes to revolutionizing the way businesses and industries work. Find out more from Aditya Khanduri on Plutora’s blog.