Steve Fenton

As ancient fables go, The Boy Who Cried Wolf is certainly one of the big ones. For those who haven’t yet heard it, well done! Teachers love to tell this story in an attempt to instruct students on morals, though this is misguided as the story may increase a child’s propensity to lie (NurtureShock: New […]

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 […]

This is a bonus post that follows up on some information that is useful if you read Web Operations Dashboards, Monitoring, and Alerting. This article is all about uptime and SLAs. Having helped a number of businesses understand what uptime and SLAs are, and how they work in real life, I have encountered a few […]

This is the last in a series of posts to share some techniques that I wrote about in Web Operations Dashboards, Monitoring, and Alerting. In this final bite-size chunk, I’m going to talk about the Monitor Matrix. Selecting monitors has a gradual evolution. You start off monitoring the things that everyone starts monitoring. You keep […]

This is one more article in a series of posts to share some techniques that I wrote about in Web Operations Dashboards, Monitoring, and Alerting. In this article, I’m going to talk about Monitor Selection Principles. While it can be tempting to start off by monitoring everything, and alerting every time something slightly odd happens, […]

This is the next in a series of posts to share some techniques that I wrote about in Web Operations Dashboards, Monitoring, and Alerting. In this instalment, I’m going to talk about the Alerting Principles. When it comes to monitoring alerting is an area you will want to get right. There is a natural tension […]

This is another in a series of posts to share some techniques that I wrote about in Web Operations Dashboards, Monitoring, and Alerting. In this article, I’m going to talk about incident investigations and the causations principles. When things go wrong, it may be that some internal trigger such as a software release or configuration […]

This is one of a series of posts to share some techniques that I wrote about in Web Operations Dashboards, Monitoring, and Alerting. In this article, I’m going to talk about the Three Fs of event log monitoring. When you first start collecting event logs, it is likely that you will be inundated with a […]

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 AutoHeal feature for Azure Web Sites is your family-friendly helper that will take care of minor issues without […]