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While there a whole host of great ideas you can apply to monitoring and alerting, one of the key reasons you spend time crafting your operations story is to avoid being interrupted during family time. So the auto-healing feature for Azure Web Sites is your family friendly helper that will take care of minor issues […]
Octopus Deploy has a very smart system of variable management that allows you to scope variables to machines, environments, steps, roles – and to store variables in projects and in shared library sets. It is so flexible, you could make your life very miserably if you don’t make things as manageable as possible. Scope Octopus […]
So you have a SQL Cluster and you want to run a database upgrade using Octopus Deploy… where do you start? There are actually two strategies you can employ to do this, and you can choose the most appropriate one based on how you have things set up. Octopus Deploy is cluster-agnoistic, but you can […]
Octopus Deploy has a web portal that runs a self-hosted website on whatever port you specify. You can even have Octopus generate a self-signed certificate in order to use HTTPS when browsing the web portal… but if you connect other application that are strictly validating certificates, they won’t be too pleased with self-signed certificates. Purchasing […]
In the days of XAML Builds in TFS, the build would rather handily update the work item with the appropriate “Integration Build” value… so you knew which release would include your fix. Happy days. Along came vNext builds in TFS / Visual Studio Online / Visual Studio Team Services, which solved all of the pain […]
This is not our preferred method of deployment, but we have some batch-file based deployments still in active use (most of our deployments are executed via Octopus Deploy, but some of the concepts below are re-usable there too). One of the tasks we perform during a deployment is a database backup prior to schema changes. […]
Unless you enjoy carefully comparing numbers, the Octopus Deploy Dashboard is a bit of a pain when it comes to seeing what version is one what environment. What follows is a terribly hacky trick you can use to colourise the version numbers on the dashboard (a feature that I imagine will eventually become a graceful […]
This will seem like a strange issue, because everything will work perfectly well for a period of time – but then it will all go wrong and you’ll get an error such as: Error messages: The distribution agent failed to create temporary files in ‘C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\110\COM’ directory. System returned errorcode 5. (Source: MSSQL_REPL, […]
There are two competing fundamental needs for web operations… reducing false alarms, and ensuring you never miss a real incident! Here is a useful DataDog feature that you might not be using and that can help out a great deal in finding that magical balance-point between these two competing needs… interactive monitor reports. You can […]
This is one of the few hitches you may come across when deploying to IIS from Octopus Deploy: Cannot create a file when that file already exists. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x800700B7) This error simply means something is already running on the port number that you are planning on using (and that probably means the default […]
