In the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic, investments in digital business transformation have accelerated. The applications that drive those processes are not only highly distributed, they also operate at a level of scale that no IT team can manage using legacy approaches to managing IT. It can take weeks to discover the root cause of any issue.
Information Technology (IT) has always relied on monitoring to provide an understanding of how systems perform over time. The basics has always been to collect a series of metrics and to build an algorithm that shows how these metrics are related, and then to show when a system is either reaching the limits of its capacity or is likely to break.
Monitoring – Since rejoining Nastel, after a long period away in the cloud, I’ve been wondering why people are now talking about ‘observability’ when they used to talk about ‘monitoring’. Why is there a new term? A new piece of technical jargon. I’ve been reading up on it and it seems that each vendor describes it slightly differently, and amazingly that difference is the key feature that makes their product different to everyone else’s. Some are talking about Java byte code instrumentation, some are talking about the complete absence of instrumentation – inferring things from the outside, some talk about Artificial Intelligence, some about DevOps. Some think observability is seeing the end to end application whereas monitoring is seeing the low level IT.
On my first trip to India I stayed right across from the gateway of India. This is a tourist area, especially popular for the locals, and some international travelers. From my hotel window, I could see street vendors with these really big balloons. They were probably 6 feet in length. Later that day I decided…
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Managing and Enforcing Automated DevOps of MQ Environments. Nastel is well known for producing some powerful GUIs (graphical user interfaces) for managing and monitoring IBM MQ but is there still a place for these as the world moves towards DevOps with automated continuous integration and continuous delivery?
Nastel has a free download available here called AutoPilot MQSpeedtest for IBM MQ. The purpose of the MQSpeedtest utility is to measure various times related to queue manager message flow. Much like traditional sonar technology, this is completed by sending a ping which is picked up by the target and echoed back. By measuring the time spent it can determine various characteristics of the message path. In IBM MQ terms, it sends messages to a listening application which replies with a response to those messages. MQSpeedtest captures various times along the message path as well as the round-trip times.
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