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Whether you use Pingdom, UpDn, Datadog, or some other platform to test if your website is up and running, you will need to keep in mind some common traps that are waiting to ensnare the unsuspecting. The idea behind an uptime checker is that it will visit your site frequently and report whether it managed […]
One of the tenets of automation is that while you can produce stuff faster, your mistakes will happen at the same speed. You might replace manually updating 100 files with a process that updates them all in the blink of an eye… but what if it updates more files than you intended. In developer terms, […]
When importing a file full of data into a test system, I discovered that the CSV library I was using to do all the work was stopping when it reached a blank line. That makes sense, it thinks the data has ended. On inspection, I found quite a lot of blank lines, so there was […]
Yesterday I had to look at a list of stuff on a third-party website and match it up to a list of stuff we control. It took quite a bit of time and some Excel shenanigans to complete the task and as I know it’s going to crop up again, I decided to employ PowerShell […]
This is a note-to-future-self as I just threw together a little script to test images on a web page. Specifically, it highlights: Images that are not lazy loaded Images that are much bigger than their display size As images sizes aren’t reliable until the image is displayed, you will need to run it if your […]
There are many reasons for manipulating variables in JMeter, especially when you are loading data from a CSV data set config element. You might want to trim a JMeter variable, or grab just a substring. In all of these cases, your existing knowledge of JavaScript can come to the rescue. Wherever you were about to […]
Most of my time is spent in technical-land, where we use tools such as Azure DevOps to manage the flow of work. There is, though, another side to our business and they love Trello. For at least part of my day, I’m looking at colourful lists of stuff that the business are pushing around in […]
I recently attended an event in Manchester, organised by BJSS and Microsoft, on the subject of AI and ML. The schedule was jam packed with interesting insights and useful case studies that got my head buzzing. Having had some time to reflect on everything I absorbed on the day, I have realised that we are […]
When you think about Datadog, you are very often thinking about charts. Which visualisations will bring forth insights from your metrics. What actionable information can you present on your wallboards. What you might not be thinking about is the humble subject of Datadog notes. You can add notes to your dashboard using the Edit Dashboard […]
If you are using Datadog, you know you can log to Datadog using the Windows event log, or by calling the DogStatsD interface on your local agent. When you are running in a non-machine context, such as an Azure App Service, it is likely you won’t be running an agent; so how do you log […]