Introduction​

Cloud maintenance is a common practice in the tech industry. Whether you manage your own infrastructure or use a cloud provider, you will need to plan for maintenance and include it as part of your operational readiness. This ensures that your team is prepared for potential downtime and can deal with any incidents in a timely manner. This article will cover some best practices for planning for upcoming cloud maintenance.

Introduction​

A public status page is a page that you can share with your team to show a summary view of your third-party dependencies. We rolled out this feature recently to all IncidentHub users. This article is a quick tour of the feature and how to set it up.

Introduction​

IncidentHub can send outage alerts to many external systems. You can choose from Slack, Webhook, Email, Discord, PagerDuty, and more. Alerts are effective only when they are relevant and actionable. In this article, we will explore how to fine-tune your IncidentHub alerts to receive only the relevant ones for your third-party services.

Introduction​

Your business depends on the reliability of the third-party services you use. Monitoring the status pages of these services is the best way of keeping track of their outages and maintenances. Although some status pages let you subscribe to alerts, there is no standard way of doing this. Service providers can change their status page providers, disable subscriptions, or not support the same notification options.

A status page aggregator is a tool that solves all these problems by aggregating the status pages of multiple services in one place. If you depend on only 2-3 third-party services, you can probably get away without a status page aggregator. Beyond this, it will become harder to stay on top of third-party service outages and maintenances, leaving gaps in your monitoring.

Let's look at the top 6 reasons why you need a status page aggregator.

Introduction​

IncidentHub has many integrations to receive alerts. You can choose from Slack, Webhook, Email, Discord, PagerDuty, and more. In this article, we will explore how to receive IncidentHub alerts in your webhooks.

Introduction​

For the last two months, we have focused on improving the onboarding experience for users so that they can get started with monitoring with minimal effort. We have also added several improvements in the backend to make the service more robust and reliable. Some of the usability improvements are driven by user feedback. Others incorporate what we would personally like to see in such a monitoring service. We have also improved the dashboard user experience.

Introduction​

This article is part of a series on setting up an end-to-end monitoring and alerting stack using Prometheus.

Continuing our series on setting Prometheus in a Docker container, we will add a Grafana instance to our Prometheus setup.

Please refer to the previous article where we use docker compose to run Prometheus and Alertmanager together as that forms the basis to run multiple related containers. We will add a container to run Grafana to the same compose file in this article.

Introduction​

A status page forms a key part of your incident communication strategy. When it comes to setting up a status page, you have two options:

• Host your own - using either an open source project or a custom solution.
• Use a managed status page provider.

We will examine the pros and cons of each option along these dimensions:

1. Feature Set
2. Service Related

For 1, if you choose a self-managed, open-source or custom solution, it's in your control. For a managed solution, you are limited by the provider's feature set.

For 2, if you choose a self-managed solution, your team is responsible for the quality of the service. For a managed solution, you are dependent on the provider's service quality.

In most cases, you are better off using a managed solution from a reputed provider, unless you have:

• Specific requirements that are not met by the vendor.
• Budget constraints.

Introduction​

If you manage applications running on cloud platforms, you likely depend on multiple cloud vendors and services. These could be infrastructure providers like AWS, GCP or Azure. A vulnerability in any of these services could potentially impact your applications and your users.

A cloud platform has many moving parts, many of which are dependent on other third-party providers. For example:

• Operating system images for VMs which are maintained by third-party vendors.
• Container images which are hosted on external repositories.
• Software stacks which are maintained by other vendors but available for deployment on the cloud provider.
• Libraries used by the cloud provider's internal software which are maintained by other developers or organizations.
• Control plane software like Kubernetes.
• Hardware, like processors, which are provided by the manufacturer.
• Hypervisors which are developed and maintained by third-party vendors.
• Networking hardware manufactured by other vendors.

Introduction​

This article is part of a series on setting up an end-to-end monitoring and alerting stack using Prometheus.

Continuing our series on setting up Prometheus in a container, this article provides a step-by-step guide for how to configure alerts in Prometheus. We will add alerting rules and deploy Prometheus Alertmanager with Slack integration.

If you follow the steps in this article, you will end up with a containerized setup for:

1. A Prometheus instance with alerting rules.
2. An Alertmanager instance which can send alerts originating from those rules to a Slack channel.

Let's get started.