Author: Vishal Padghan

Site reliability engineering is a new practice that has been growing in popularity among many businesses. Also known as SRE, the new activity puts a premium on monitoring, tracking bugs, and creating systems and automation that solve the problem in the long term.

Nowadays, most companies get fond of deploying band-aid solutions that often leave them with flawed systems that easily fall apart when bugs arise. SRE practice fixes that by putting a premium on proactively monitoring problems and creating long-term solutions. As more companies adopt SRE, they change the way IT departments operate.

Modern-day software development approaches like DevOps have certainly reduced development time. However, tighter release deadlines push security practices to a corner. This blog explains how Shifting Security to the Left introduces security in the early stages of the DevOps Lifecycle, thus fixing software bugs proactively.

We have come a long way in the DevOps lifecycle, from releasing the code every month(or sometimes more than that) to every day(or every hour). Throughout this process, it feels like security has been left behind a little. The main reason behind that is that security will slow down the DevOps Lifecycle and the entire software pipeline. 

On-call schedules ensure that there’s someone available day and night to fix or escalate any issues that arise. Using an on-call schedule helps keep things running smoothly. These on-call workers can be anyone from nurses and doctors required to respond to emergencies to IT and software engineering staff who need to fix service outages or significant bugs. 

Being on-call can be challenging and stressful. But with the proper practices in place, on-call schedules can fit well into an employee’s work-life balance while still meeting the organization’s needs.

Site reliability engineering (SRE) is a discipline in which automated software systems are built to manage the development operations (DevOps) of a product or service. In other words, SRE automates the functions of an operations team via software systems. 

The main purpose of SRE is to encourage the deployment and proper maintenance of large-scale systems. In particular, site reliability engineers are responsible for ensuring that a given system’s behavior consistently meets business requirements for performance and availability.

In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, businesses increasingly rely on cloud computing and infrastructure to support their operations. As organizations migrate their workloads to the cloud, robust monitoring and management tools are paramount to ensure optimal performance, security, and efficiency. In response to this demand, Microsoft Azure has introduced the Azure Monitoring Agent (AMA), a powerful and versatile solution designed to enhance the monitoring capabilities of Azure resources.

AMA is a lightweight yet potent agent that plays a crucial role in collecting and transmitting telemetry data from various resources within the Azure ecosystem. It serves as a bridge between Azure resources, on-premises servers, and virtual machines, enabling users to gain deep insights into the health and performance of their applications and infrastructure.

In today’s digital world, cloud computing is necessary for businesses of all types and sizes, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) is undoubtedly the most popular cloud computing service provider. AWS provides a vast array of services, including CloudWatch and CloudTrail, that can monitor and log events in AWS resources.

This article will compare AWS CloudWatch and CloudTrail, looking at their features, use cases, and technical considerations. It will also provide implementation guides and pricing details for each.

As one of the most popular open-source Kubernetes monitoring solutions, Prometheus leverages a multidimensional data model of time-stamped metric data and labels. The platform uses a pull-based architecture to collect metrics from various targets. It stores the metrics in a time-series database and provides the powerful PromQL query language for efficient analysis and data visualization.

Despite its powerful capabilities, there are several key considerations that determine the observability efficiency of a Kubernetes cluster through Prometheus. These considerations include:

Prometheus is a robust monitoring and alerting system widely used in cloud-native and Kubernetes environments. One of the critical features of Prometheus is its ability to create and trigger alerts based on metrics it collects from various sources. Additionally, you can analyze and filter the metrics to develop:

• Complex incident response algorithms
• Service Level Objectives
• Error budget calculations
• Post-mortem analysis or retrospectives 
• Runbooks to resolve common failures

In this article, we look at Prometheus alert rules in detail. We cover alert template fields, the proper syntax for writing a rule, and several Prometheus sample alert rules you can use as is. Additionally, we also cover some challenges and best practices in Prometheus alert rule management and response. 

Site reliability engineering (SRE) is a critical discipline that focuses on ensuring modern systems and applications' continuous availability and performance. One of the most vital aspects of SRE is incident response, a structured process for identifying, assessing, and resolving system incidents that can lead to downtime, revenue loss, and brand reputation damage. 

This article discusses the importance of incident response, examining the key elements of triaging and troubleshooting and offering real-world examples to demonstrate their practical applications. We will then use our insights to create an ideal incident response plan that can be utilized by teams of all sizes to effectively manage and mitigate system incidents, ensuring the highest levels of service reliability and user satisfaction.

Modern-day markets are highly competitive, and in order to foster stronger customer relations, we see businesses striving hard to be always available and operational. Hence, businesses invest heavily to ensure higher uptime and to have dedicated teams that constantly monitor the performance of an organization’s IT resources. In this article, we will explore what NOC teams are and why they are important.

The following pointers are covered in this article:

Incident severity levels and priority are invaluable to solving infrastructural problems faster. This blog helps you understand levels of severity and how they can enhance your incident response process.

Major outages are bound to occur in even the most well-maintained infrastructure and systems. Being able to quickly classify the severity level also allows your on-call team to respond more effectively. 

Distributed caching is an important aspect of cloud-based applications, be it for on-premises, public, or hybrid cloud environments. It facilitates incremental scaling, allowing the cache to grow and incorporate the data growth. In this blog, we will explore distributed caching on the cloud and why it is useful for environments with high data volume and load. This blog will cover the following:

• Traditional Caching Challenges
• What is Distributed Caching
• Benefits of Distributed Caching on cloud 
• Recommended Distributed Caching Database Tools
• Ways to Deploy Distributed Caching on Hybrid Cloud

Traditional Caching Challenges

Traditional caching servers are usually deployed with limited storage and CPU speed. Often these caching infrastructures reside in data centers that are on-premises. I am referring to a non-distributed caching server. Traditional distributed caching comes with numerous challenges:

With the growing complexity of IT environments, it is essential to have robust security processes that can safeguard IT environments from cyber threats. This blog will explore how security operation centers (SOCs) help you monitor, identify and prevent cyber and operational threats to safeguard your IT environments.

What Is a Security Operation Center (SOC)?

A security operations center (SOC), pronounced ‘sock,’ is a team made of security experts that provide situational awareness and management of threats. A SOC looks after the entire security process of a business. It acts as a bridge that collects data from different  IT assets like infrastructure, networks, cloud services, and devices. This data helps monitor and analyze future threats and then take steps to prevent or respond to them.

It is important to invest time and effort in understanding why a system performs the way it does and how we can improve it. Companies continue with practices that yield successful results but ignoring anti-patterns can be far worse than choosing rigid processes. In this article, we will explore anti-patterns in incident response and why you should unlearn those.

Common Anti-Patterns in Incident Response 

Just Get Everyone on the Call 

Alerting everyone each time an incident is detected is not the best of practices. Sometimes notifying everyone is easier or adds value. For example:

If done right, retrospectives can help you inspect past actions, help adapt to future requirements and guide teams towards continuous improvement. However, organizations find it difficult to adopt the right mindset to execute retrospectives effectively. This article will help you understand what retrospectives are and provide valuable tips to make your retrospectives meaningful.

This article will cover: 

What Is Incident Response?

An incident is an event (network outage, system failure, data breach, etc.) that can lead to loss of, or disruption to, an organization's operations, services or functions. Incident Response is an organization’s effort to detect, analyze, and correct the hazards caused due to an incident. In the most common cases, when an incident response is mentioned, it usually relates to security incidents. Sometimes incident response and incident management are more or less used interchangeably.

However, an incident can be of any nature, it doesn’t have to be tied to security, for example: