This blog post provides an overview of observability tools for DevOps engineers and SREs. Observability is essential for understanding system behavior and troubleshooting problems in complex IT infrastructure. The blog explores different categories of observability tools including log aggregation, APM, distributed tracing, time-series databases, and metrics collection. Examples of popular tools in each category are provided along with a brief description of their features. Finally, the blog emphasizes the importance of choosing the right observability tools based on your specific needs and highlights the benefits of implementing a strong observability strategy.

This blog post offers guidance on building and maintaining an SRE team. It emphasizes the importance of SRE in today's world and outlines seven key tips to achieve success. Here's a summary of those tips:

Start small and focus internally: Begin by assigning staff from existing departments to focus on maintaining service reliability.

Recruit the right people: Look for SRE professionals with problem-solving skills, automation expertise, and a commitment to continuous learning. They should also be excellent team players with a broad perspective. Consider using SRE tooling to improve team efficiency.

Define your SLOs: Establish clear and achievable performance indicators for your systems.

Establish a holistic incident management system: Implement a system for tracking on-call duties and streamlining the incident resolution process. SRE tooling can be helpful here.

Accept failure as inevitable: Recognize that failures are part of the development process. Focus on creating a minimum viable product and improving over time.

Conduct incident postmortems to learn from mistakes: Analyze incidents to identify root causes and develop solutions to prevent future occurrences.

Maintain a user-friendly incident management system: Choose an incident management system that is easy to use, fosters communication, and integrates with other relevant tools.

By following these steps and leveraging SRE tooling, you can establish a strong SRE team that keeps your systems reliable and your customers satisfied.

Tech Radar | 3 | Lets explore NATS.IO distributed messaging made easy !!

This blog post talks about how to handle incidents effectively in an organization. It emphasizes the importance of having a well-defined plan that outlines steps to take when an incident occurs. The article also details several helpful tools and best practices to follow. Here are the key takeaways:

Why it's important: Minimizes downtime, revenue loss, and brand reputation damage.

Steps to take: Identify/classify incidents, communicate effectively, assign roles, and have standard procedures.

Essential tools: Monitoring/alerting tools, service catalog, log management, runbook automation, collaboration platforms, and incident management platforms.

Best practices: Regularly train staff, conduct simulations, review incidents, and continuously improve the plan.

This blog post explores alternatives to Pagerduty, a popular incident management tool. It emphasizes features to consider when choosing an alternative, including user-friendliness, scheduling, notifications, workflows, integrations, and cost.

The blog compares Pagerduty with ServiceNow, highlighting strengths and weaknesses of each. While Pagerduty is user-friendly with pre-built features, ServiceNow offers more powerful customization.

Finally, the blog introduces Squadcast as a well-rounded alternative that combines the strengths of both Pagerduty and ServiceNow, with a focus on user-friendliness, powerful workflows, and competitive pricing.

Let’s cut to the chase—SendGrid vs Mailgun. What are the differences between these email sending platforms and which one should you choose?

I aim to answer these questions and provide you with an in-depth comparison of SendGrid and Mailgun.

Disclaimer: The features, prices, and ratings are up-to-date as of writing this article. But, they could change in the future, so they might be different when you’re reading.

The evolution of QA services from manual efforts to AI-driven processes showcases the technology sector’s commitment to improving software quality and efficiency.

This blog post explores alternatives to Splunk On-Call (formerly VictorOps) because of potential drawbacks like cost, limited features, and hidden fees. It compares 9 VictorOps alternatives including Squadcast, Opsgenie, and Moogsoft. Key factors to consider when choosing an alternative are cost transparency, features, ease of use, and support. The blog highlights Squadcast as a strong replacement for Splunk On-Call due to its transparent pricing, all-in-one functionality, user-friendly interface, and excellent support.

Alert Suppression: Conquer Alert Fatigue and Streamline Incident Management

This blog post tackles alert fatigue, a common issue in today's IT world. It explains how alert suppression can be a powerful tool to silence unnecessary notifications and focus on critical incidents.

The blog explores the benefits of alert suppression, including reduced fatigue, improved efficiency, and better situational awareness. It also details steps to implement suppression rules, including identifying unnecessary alerts, defining suppression criteria, and testing and monitoring the effectiveness of the rules.

Squadcast, a powerful incident management platform, is highlighted for its robust Alert Suppression features. These features include a user-friendly UI-based Rule Builder, a Raw String Method for advanced users (with a code example demonstrating suppression with the discard() function), and flexible conditions for rule creation.

In conclusion, the blog emphasizes the value of alert suppression in streamlining incident management and recommends exploring solutions like Squadcast for a calmer and more efficient workflow.

In PostgreSQL, the slow query log is a feature that allows you to log queries that take longer than a specified threshold to execute. This log helps you identify and optimize queries that may be causing performance issues in your database. Let’s see how we can use it.