Below are posts from our authors this week. We hope you’re all staying safe out there.
Mean Time To Repair (MTTR): What It Is and How To Reduce It
In today’s data-focused world, we want to identify and use metrics to improve our customers’ experience. And when it comes to incident management, we often talk about the concepts of mean time to repair and mean time between failures. Both of these metrics help identify the effect that system incidents have on our customers’ experience. Therefore, we want to reduce the impact that system incidents have on our customers. And we want to continuously improve over time. Today we’ll discuss the first of the two metrics mentioned: mean time to repair (MTTR). Find out more from Sylvia Fronczak on Scalyr’s blog.
KPI Examples: 12 Important Ones Across The Entire Org Chart
A key performance indicator (KPI) measures how effective a company’s efforts are at improving their chances of attaining targeted goals. Every time a new target is set, it’s wise and customary to set trackers that monitor if you’re getting closer to the target over time. It’s possible to set and monitor KPIs across any company’s organizational chart, including software companies. This post highlights a few KPI examples across the sales, marketing, digital transformation, and software delivery departments. Learn more from Taurai Mutimutema on Plutora’s blog.
RAG Status and Its Crucial Role in Organizational Leadership
The RAG status of a project or any of its milestones is the level at which resources, like money, time, and talent affect its expected success. RAG — or red/amber/green — thus becomes a code to either alert or assure stakeholders of the current state of a project. The RAG code can be adapted across other domains, besides project management. The road traffic safety standard code is one such area. This post focuses on applying a RAG status analysis to software development. Taurai Mutimutema can give you the details on Plutora’s blog.
Learnings from Sqreen’s State of App Sec Report: 70% of Ruby on Rails exploits were SQLi
Saying that digital security is “important” would be the understatement of the century. It’s probably the most crucial aspect of any application nowadays. Unfortunately, security is easy to get wrong, and many developers and organizations do. Count yourself lucky if you never encountered a site that stores passwords in plain text, for instance. Developers and organizations must get better at security, and for that, we need education and insights backed by real data. That’s why Sqreen put together its first State of Application Security Report. Check it out in this post from Carlos Schults on Sqreen’s blog.
HAProxy Logging- How to Tune Timeouts for Performance
HAProxy (high availability proxy) is a critical part of modern systems infrastructure. It’s ideally the first point of contact for users who access your application. When configured correctly, HAProxy improves your app’s performance significantly. Through load balancing, HAProxy makes sure each service your application depends on is accessible to users, especially under load conditions otherwise impacting application performance. Find out more about HAProxy from Taurai Mutimutema on Solarwinds’ blog.
Tips for Optimizing Apps Running in Heroku
Heroku is a popular platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud that allows you to run your applications in a serverless manner. This blog is about optimizing applications running in Heroku: making them run faster, giving them better security, and generally fine-tuning them. Learn more from Alexander Fridman on Solarwinds’ blog.
Logging From Windows – Getting Started
Logging is everywhere. Few technologies or techniques are as omnipresent in the technology world as logging. You can find logging in applications and in web and application servers. Operating systems also generate logs, and so do database systems. Since logging can manifest itself in so many ways, sometimes it makes sense to focus on one logging flavor at a time. In this post, we’ll cover Windows logging. Check it out in this post from Carlos Schults on Solarwinds’ blog.
Troubleshooting Tracking Pixel Logs
Do you have tracking pixels on your webpages? Tracking pixels have many benefits, so if the answer is no, you might want to consider them. And if your answer is yes, are you collecting data with the tracking pixels? How do you log this data? Logs keep records of the data collected. Find out more about tracking pixel logs from Pius Aboyi on Solarwinds’ blog.
Express.js and Morgan Logging
Express.js is one of the most popular web frameworks for Node.js. It allows you to build APIs and other web applications quickly and effortlessly. But building a server is only half the battle—the other half is maintaining it. To have a good understanding of what’s happening to your application, you need to read the logs. But logging can be painful (as in digging through thousands of not-really-important log entries looking for one line with an actual relevant error message) if not taken care of properly. Building a web server with Node.js can be done the hard way or the easy way (Express.js). The same applies for logging in Express.js, which can be also done the hard way or the easy way (using morgan). In this post, you’ll learn what morgan is, how to use it with Express.js, and what benefits it brings. Check it out in this post from Dawid Ziolkowski on Solarwinds’ blog.
What Is Cross-Browser Testing? A Simple, Practical Guide
We also updated some posts this week, like this one on cross-browser testing. Back in the old days, people used only Internet Explorer (IE) to view web pages. But nowadays, multiple options are available. There are more than 100 browsers, and people have the option to view sites in their preferred browser. This is where cross-browser testing comes into play. Find out more on Testim’s blog.
What Is Log Aggregation and How Does It Help You?
We also updated a post on log aggregation. In order to understand the idea of log aggregation, you need to understand the pain it alleviates. You’ve almost certainly felt this pain, even if you don’t realize it. Let’s consider a scenario that every programmer has probably experienced. You’re staring at some gigantic, dusty log file, engaging in what I like to think of as “programming archaeology.” And you have a headache. Log aggregation is the practice of gathering up disparate log files for the purposes of organizing the data in them and making them searchable. Learn all about it on Scalyr’s blog.