The concept of observability is a valuable one, but the way the term has been used is misleading and leaves some teams worse off because of limitations in what observability tools actually provide. Enterprises need to rethink what observability means and regard it as a practice rather than a catch-all product category that can serve every team member’s needs equally. 

There are several teams that can benefit from observability, and they each have needs specific to their roles and responsibilities. For example, key constituents include:

• SRE and infrastructure specialists
• Data engineers
• Developers
• Security specialists

What enterprises really need from observability

Each of these teams need actionable information to help them address the specific issues they confront in their roles. Crucially, this information must not just alert them that a problem exists but also provide the specific details and context to help address the problem quickly.

For example, in the context of security, observability tools must help security practitioners to quickly detect and mitigate threats and vulnerabilities. The tools should provide metrics to help explain why incidents occurred and suggest proactive measures to mitigate against threats in future.

For data engineering teams, observability tools should provide visibility across data pipelines and data products. Data practitioners need to know when the source of data in a pipeline changes, for example, and what action they need to take to maintain the integrity of their data applications.

For developers, observability tools need to know not just that an error or a performance issue occurred, but also direct them to the specific coding issue that caused the error. They also need information to help them prioritize errors and know which to address first, delivered in the context of their workflows, not in a separate tool.

Providing teams with actionable detail that’s specific to their roles creates greater ownership and accountability for each practice area, because specialists get the information they need delivered directly to them. In contrast, treating observability as a catch-all product area leads to multiple teams chasing after the latest problem, no matter the source of that issue. Observability has skewed too far towards solving cloud infrastructure challenges, and this approach doesn’t do enough for specialists in other areas.

Here are three myths of observability that have emerged as a result of this wrong-headed thinking:

Myth 1. Observability is a product. We need to stop thinking about observability as a product and start to regard it for what it actually is: a practice. When we view observability as a practice, we quickly realize that each practice area has its own needs that cannot be addressed with a single pane of glass. 

Myth 2. Observability is the same for every persona. Each practice area has its own distinct needs, and that means they need information that addresses their specific roles and objectives, delivered in the context of their usual workflow. What’s useful for an SRE will not be the same as what’s useful for a developer or a security specialist. 

Myth 3. More data solves everything. Data alone is not a silver bullet, and too much data can become a liability when it needs to be securely stored and managed at scale. One financial services firm was recently hit with an observability bill of $65 million, reportedly due to unpredictable spikes in the data collected.

An approach that targets specialists with just the data they need to solve the problem at hand is far more efficient than collecting all logs, metrics and trace data and trying to analyze it after the fact.

Technology specialists in areas like security, data and software development are far more effective — and happier — when they get the information they need to solve problems quickly and take ownership of their work. Observability is an important area, but treating it as a product rather than a practice can lead to higher costs and poorer outcomes for the business.

The post 3 Myths About Observability — And Why They’re Holding Back Your Teams appeared first on SD Times.

The additions are aimed at enhancing Performance Monitoring including Data Sampling, Performance Issues, Real User Application Profiling, and Session Replay. 

Dynamic Sampling now enables developers to control the amount of visibility into their application’s performance based on real-time business changes. 

Also, Issues has evolved to support multiple kinds of issue types. It shows the most critical performance problems in applications and captures and groups unique problems together to provide more actionable context like Error Issues. 

Real User Application Profiling can now identify the exact functions and lines that are consuming a user’s device and Session Replay offers a visual reply to surface the cause of an error or latency issue. 

“We have evolved an old space with a much-needed revamp that expands the concept of monitoring an application to be immediately valuable for developers, by focusing on actionability and real outcomes, instead of just more charts,” said Milin Desai, the CEO at Sentry. “In a world that is increasingly end-user driven, the developers building these web and mobile apps need the visibility and code-level control to protect the user experience.”

Dynamic Sampling, Performance Issues, and Real User Application Profiling is available in open beta.

The post Sentry announces new monitoring capabilities for developers appeared first on SD Times.

Currently, Codefresh Hub for Argo features a range of Codefresh’s most in-demand integrations and steps, with more to come as the marketplace continues to grow. Additionally, all contributors to Codefresh Hub for Argo are eligible for certification via a security auditing process that assures trusted templates and steps enabling enterprise grade reliability and efficiency for Argo workflows. 

Codefresh Hub for Argo is available now to Argo Workflow community users. 

Sentry acquires Specto

The application monitoring company Sentry today revealed that it has acquired Specto, a mobile profiling tool that provides developers with data and analytics around their app performance. This acquisition adds deeper context in mobile application monitoring.

With this acquisition, Specto’s team, including co-founder and former Facebook mobile engineers Jernej Strasner and Indragie Karunaratne, will join Sentry. To learn more, visit Sentry’s or Specto’s websites. 

Twilio unveils Twilio Ventures 

Twilio, the cloud communications platform, today announced the launch of Twilio Ventures as well as its new $50 million fund designed for the next generation of builders that are creating the future of user engagement. 

Twilio Ventures will mainly invest in early stage companies with opportunistic investments in late stage companies that focus on both user engagement and developers. In addition to investing, the venture program will provide portfolio organizations with continuous mentorship, potential product and go-to-market support, and exposure to Twilio’s leadership, partners, and customers.

Twilio Ventures has already completed investments this year. Beneficiaries include companies such as Algolia, Mux, Hyro, Calixa, Well Health Inc., and Terazo. To learn more about Twilio Ventures, visit here. 

Cloudflare acquires Zaraz

Cloudflare, the security, performance, and reliability company, today announced that it has acquired Zaraz, an organization that has developed technology to accelerate and secure websites by reducing the impact of third-party marketing and analytics tools. This comes as Cloudflare’s first acquisition built on its own technology, Cloudflare Workers. 

With this acquisition, companies can run as many third-party tools as are needed, without slowing down their website, compromising their security, or sacrificing their users’ privacy. Zaraz utilizes Cloudflare Workers to replace the multiple network requests of each tool with one single request, shifting a web of extensions into a single application. 

“Using Workers meant that we were able to optimize Zaraz for performance and security, something traditional tag managers couldn’t do. We’re excited to join Cloudflare’s team so that we can make a difference across the entire Internet, making it faster, better, and safer for everyone,” said Yair Dovrat, co-founder and CEO of Zaraz.

The post SD Times news digest: Codefresh announces new Argo community marketplace; Sentry acquires Specto; Twilio unveils Twilio Ventures appeared first on SD Times.

The inspiration comes from other open source funds that came before it, including FOSS Fund Adopters, launched by Indeed, which resulted in a $10,000 to Sentry itself, which is an open source company. When Sentry received the investment, it committed to increasing its own financial giving to the open source community.

According to the company, the specific donation amount was carefully calculated. Tech companies receive an average of $2,000 of value per staff engineer from volunteer labor from the open source community. Since Sentry employs 75 engineers, it multiplied 75 by $2,000 to come up with $150,000 as a target budget. The excess is money to meet membership fee thresholds and currency conversions. 

“All tech companies stand on the shoulders of community-supported open source giants, and Sentry is no exception. With this fund we prioritized support for our dependencies in order to strengthen our supply chain. But, more than that—Sentry itself was a volunteer-run project for many years. Yes, we took a commercial route, but we respect the many projects that have chosen a different path. Maintainers should be able to determine their own future, and financially supporting our community-managed dependencies makes that a bit more feasible for them,” Chad Whitacre, senior software engineer at Sentry, wrote in a blog post.  

The funds from FOSS Fund 155 are grouped into three categories: foundation memberships (52% of money), long-tail projects through GitHub Sponsors and Open Collective (36%), and internships for new contributors through Outreachery (13%).  

To determine who to give money to, it audited its product architecture and determined that the seven major open source projects that it is dependent on are Python, Django, Rust, JavaScript, PostgreSQL, Apache, and Linux. It gave 52% of funds to the foundations for each project, in addition to the Open Source Initiative in order to represent the community overall. 

The post Sentry’s FOSS Fund 155 to financially support open source community appeared first on SD Times.

The wear library allows users to lay out elements in an arch and write curved text in order to support the curvature of round watches. In addition, wear-input identifies and interacts with hardware buttons on Wear OS devices. Wear-ongoing features Surface Ongoing Notifications in new Wear specific surfaces. Wear-phone-interactions detect whether the watch is paired with an iOS or Android device and handle all Notification bridging options. Finally, wear-remote-interactions allows users to open Android intents on other devices.

Domo introduces Sandbox

Today, Domo announced the release of Sandbox, a new development and testing environment built into the Domo platform. This release will serve to help users easily create and promote content into production across the enterprise.

According to Domo, Sandbox will assist professionals by providing a safe and governed space to collaborate before releasing new BI-related content into production, creating a smoother roll out. 

Sandbox builds upon the governance capabilities of Domo’s modern BI platform such as personalized data permission (PDP), certifications, and dynamic groups.  

Learn more about Domo Sandbox here.

Sentry announces new capabilities 

Sentry announced new capabilities that significantly reduce management overhead and accelerate issue response times for enterprise development teams.

These include percent-based alerts, Code Owners for GitHub and GitLab, team and personal notifications in Slack, and automated Sentry access with SCIM support for Okta.

Percent-based alerts reduce noise by adjusting changes to app usage so that teams can quickly identify the right problem at the right time. Also, managers and product owners can save time assigning issues by integrating directly with the CODEOWNERS file in GitHub or GitLab. 

Uno 3.10 

Uno Platform 3.10 includes Day-0 support for .NET 6 REC1, WinUI Infobadge, and Windows 11 Fluent Styles. 

The load times for Uno Projects significantly improved, upward of 20% faster. 

Uno Platform enables the creation of pixel-perfect, single-source C# and XAML apps which run natively on Windows, iOS, Android, macOS, Linux and Web via WebAssembly. Uno Platform is free and Open Source (Apache 2.0) and available on GitHub.

Additional details about the new version are available here. 

The post SD Times news digest: Stable Jetpack Wear OS libraries, Domo Sandbox, and new Sentry capabilities appeared first on SD Times.

Starting on July 22nd, developers can appeal for an extension through the Help Center. Android said it will review each request and get back to requests as soon as possible.

Additional details are available here. 

Sentry performance monitoring for iOS and Release Health for Python 

Sentry released its Performance Monitoring for iOS and Release Health for Python to give developers a deeper view into application health to deliver consistent, seamless product experiences. 

Developers can associate slow user experiences with the backend call that needs attention.

With Release Health for Python, they can surface user experience issues and pinpoint exactly where a release began to degrade in Python-based applications.

The new solution also offers metrics for version adoption, crash-free sessions, crash-free users and real-time crash reporting and run-time errors within a single view.

Sysdig to acquire Apolicy 

Sysdig announced its intent to acquire Apolicy for infrastructure as code security with auto-remediation.

Customers can now detect runtime drift and instantly map it back to the IaC configuration (source) file, and Sysdig’s solution will now consolidate alerts by identifying the production instances that are affected by the IaC error and prioritizing IaC fixes based on application context.

Customers can also now bridge the gap between developers, DevOps and security teams with a unified view of security requirements using policy as code, according to Sysdig in a post. 

Vertica 11 released

Vertica announced the Vertica 11 Analytics Platform, which includes major features and enhancements to delivering unified analytics and machine learning across multi-cloud and multi-regional deployments with self-service container workflows.

“In Vertica 11, we expanded Vertica in Eon Mode to the Azure cloud, delivered support for Docker containers and Kubernetes, extended our market lead in advanced analytics and machine learning including time series forecasting, and much more. The feature list goes on and on – Vertica 11 is truly the unified analytics platform with the fastest performance at unlimited scale,” said Colin Mahony, the senior vice president and general manager of Vertica at Micro Focus, the company behind the solution. 

With the latest release of VerticaPy, Vertica 11 now includes more in-database machine learning, connection, and data exploration capabilities. 

Additional details on the new version are available here. 

The post SD Times news digest: Android giving extension to comply with new Play Payments Policy, Sentry performance monitoring for iOS and Release Health for Python, Sysdig to acquire Apolicy appeared first on SD Times.

Grafana Labs also introduced a new data source: Alertmanager, which is in alpha and includes built-in support for Prometheus Alertmanager. 

Also, data sources can now send real-time updates to dashboards over a websocket connection, which can be used with the MQTT data source. 

Full details about the release are available here.

Sentry announces new custom dashboards 

Sentry updated its enterprise offering with the addition of customizable dashboards and updates to its Jira and Azure DevOps integrations. 

Teams can build the dashboards to showcase important data and metrics such as errors by count, slow transactions by geography, the impact of releases and then share the results throughout the organization. 

The updated integrations automate the flow of issue triage and ticket creation so that times can see the most critical issues automatically. 

Synopsys acquires Code Dx 

Synopsys announced that it acquired Code Dx to automate the discovery, prioritization and remediation of software vulnerabilities. 

The acquisition also adds a team of R&D engineers experienced in vulnerability correlation and integrating security testing activity across the entire software development pipeline.

Synopsys provides customers a portfolio of application security solutions that include static, dynamic, and interactive application security testing and software composition analysis. The company’s Intelligent Orchestration solution automatically determines the most appropriate type of test for each scenario. 

Free tier of Docker Hub Autobuilds discontinued

Docker announced that it is taking down the free tier of its Autobuild service as of June 18th due to some people using the service for crypto mining. 

Developers who are part of the Docker Open Source program will continue to be supported as part of the Free plan. Docker is also offering 20% off of the Docker Pro and Team price for for new and returning subscriptions through June 18th. 

“While making these changes is never an easy choice, we’ve also continued to focus on making meaningful improvements to the performance of Autobuilds,” Shaun Mulligan, the principal product manager at Docker wrote in a post. “All of these improvements should see a faster and more stable build experience with lower queue times.”

Haystack Analytics funding

The engineering insights tool provider Haystack Analytics announced that it secured $1.2 million in a funding round.

The company aims to use the funding to provide solutions that help teams prevent burnout, experiment faster and ship reliably.

“Until now, it was difficult for CTOs and engineering managers to objectively know what their roadblocks are or have insights into resourcing levels. Haystack gives visibility by providing metrics and alerts to make sure nothing continues to be stuck. We are helping developers to ship faster and improve their satisfaction,” said Julian Colina, the CEO and founder of Haystack Analytics.

The post SD Times news digest: Grafana 8.0 released, Sentry custom dashboards, and Synopsys acquires Code Dx appeared first on SD Times.

“As more organizations go digital, it is important to know how your code is doing in production and not just if your systems are operational. Developers need a more direct line to the customer experience and related issues,” said Milin Desai, CEO, Sentry.

Sentry explained performance bottlenecks and coding errors result in slow search results, unresponsive services and unsatisfied customers. A recent report also found that 91% of organizations have lost out on revenue because of performance and availability issues. 

The Sentry Performance solution includes:

• Application health insights that helps developers understand customer satisfaction through application response time, latency updates and throughput data. Additionally, users can compare response times, transactions and error rates to find and fix problems.
• Transaction summaries that provide data on transaction duration time, related code errors and customer impact. “With it, you can quickly see the number of affected users as well as the transaction’s impact on your response time. And by defining Key Transactions, your team can prioritize those critical functions and callbacks that need to be addressed immediately,” the company wrote in a blog post. 
• Root cause analysis that shows the differences between outliers and normal performing transactions.
• Tracing that can reveal the exact database query that caused an error or performance issue. “Some error monitoring tools show you data from a frontend error. Only Performance can trace that frontend back to its API calls and slow database queries – all while surfacing related errors,” the company wrote.
• Performance alerts that show how crashes contribute to performance and provide updates if performance metrics fall past the predefined tolerance band.

Desai hopes by putting performance remediation in developers hands it can help reduce time to resolution, free up developer cycles and help customer satisfaction and retention. 

The post Sentry helps developers find performance issues with agentless front-end monitoring appeared first on SD Times.

According to a recently released report, mobile users are expected to grow to 7 billion by 2021 with annual mobile app downloads projected to reach 258 billion by 2022. However, developers will need more than downloads in order to achieve app success. Without proper tools to help them identify and address errors quickly, developers are at risk of app crashes and damaged brand reputation, the company explained. 

RELATED CONTENT: The coming mobile disruption

“App crashes cause more than 70% of uninstalls, and Google ranking algorithms now downrank apps with stability problems, so uptime and performance are critical for companies to remain successful and competitive in the mobile world,” said David Cramer, co-founder and CEO of Sentry. “The challenge for mobile application developers is the lack of visibility and control over the devices. And on Android, flaws in your native code, third-party dependencies or, in rare cases, even in the system libraries, can bring down the entire application.”

According to the company, the SDK and NDK feature the ability to trace bugs all the way into native libraries, provides information about the phone, and automatically collects the state of the phone. In addition, every crash and report is captured in real time, and developers can attack context information related to the error such as breadcrumbs, tags and other details.

“Errors aren’t platform-agnostic, so why should your error-monitoring services be? Sentry support for mobile, coupled with proven support for web, gives developers a complete picture, which is key in today’s complex application-centric landscape,” said Cramer. “Modern applications are not self-contained—they have multiple runtimes across the stack, causing added complexity in monitoring. While most application error monitoring solutions focus on just one platform, Sentry provides unmatched value across web, mobile and native applications.”

Other features include the ability to see the kinds of phones impacted and specific actions a user took, and an API to add application-specific data and events to crash reports. Sentry for Mobile is also available for iOS, React Mobile, Flutter and other mobile platforms.

The post Sentry brings mobile application error monitoring to Android appeared first on SD Times.

According to the company, the latest release turns application errors into iterations that can be addressed and resolved within the current workflow.

About 90 percent of software issues are a result of errors in code, Sentry explained. Despite this, monitoring tools typically focus on systems and infrastructure concerns, rather than on application issues. This forces development teams to spend a significant amount of their time investigating the details of every issue, the company said

By automatically aggregating errors and adding context in real time, Sentry says product teams can resolve issues before customers even experience a problem. The tool shows who wrote the code, when it was written in the release history, where it is in the stack trace, and what application logic is broken.

In Sentry 9, issues can be connected to specific teams that have the specific knowledge needed to resolve the issue best. It can also assign teams to specific issues in order to improve triage ability.

In addition, it now connects each issue to the commit that initially introduced the bug. It also enables developers to quickly understand where in the lifecycle an issue occurred by aggregating issued based on environment. Finally, with advanced integration with Slack it can send specific alerts to certain channels based on context.

“Modern engineering teams understand that code in production needs to be as close to bug-free as possible so it can meet the demands of users around the world,” said David Cramer, CEO of Sentry. “No release is without dependencies, so looking forward to production at every stage of development is the most effective way to avoid breaking your app and tying up your org for hours or days. Sentry is building a platform that reduces application issues in a way doesn’t disrupt, but ultimately increases, the speed and quality of development.”

Sentry also announced a $16 million series B round of funding led by its existing investors NEA and Accel. According to the company, this round of funding will support the company’s growth with more than 9,000 paying customers, tens-of-thousands of engineering organizations, and half a million developers using Sentry.

“Sentry’s growth is a testament to the now-universal truth that app users everywhere expect a flawless experience free of bugs and crashes. Poor user experience kills companies,” said Dan Levine of Accel. “In order to keep moving forward as quickly as possible, product teams need to know that customers will never leave because of a broken app update. Sentry lets every developer build software that is functionally error-free.”

The post Sentry 9 aims to deliver new ways for developers to resolve app errors faster appeared first on SD Times.