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Internal IT Automation With Puppet
A lot of ops people are rockstars when it comes to automating their production, testing, and dev environments and customer facing infrastructure, but are woefully manually-minded when it comes to internal IT. At Conductor, we’re using Puppet and Foreman (traditionally thought of as server configuration management tools) to automate the provisioning and management of our […]
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Agile and Kanban in Operations
Ops teams continually run up against two fundamental problems: a surplus of work in progress and limited capacity. When problems happen, and affect multiple production systems at the same time, we’re often left with the responsibility of designing and implementing a workaround to get everything back up and running, remediating the underlying problem, adjusting downstream systems […]
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Continuous Integration and Release Automation
Although in almost all cases, you’ll have one solution performing both of these tasks, continuous integration and release automation serve very different purposes. Continuous integration is a quality control process that helps assure that what you’re releasing won’t start smoking when the first user logs in. Release automation is an execution process that helps reduce […]
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User Feedback, Service Management, and The Service Desk
Right now, if you open your web app on a browser, whether it’s intranet or internet, customer facing or internal, a complex CRM system, or a company blog, can you click one button and get to an interface from which you can report a problem or praise a feature? If the answer is no, then you probably aren’t listening to your users as well as you could be.
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Application Performance Management – Part 1
If you’re working in web or IT operations, especially if you’re working on enterprise systems, you’re probably monitoring distinct systems that touch a lot of other systems. To get a comprehensive picture of performance, you need a full-system APM framework that lets you see bottlenecks and component uptime all the way through the path of each transaction. In this series, I’ll try to define a framework and offer some tool recommendations that you can use to implement system-wide monitoring.