The rise of DevOps engineers has changed how IT teams monitor the health of their systems and networks. Rather than having a siloed organization with specialized staff managing specific pieces of equipment, a DevOps team comprises tech generalists who take a more holistic view of the system and prioritize application performance. They need a different set of metrics, along with notifications and alerts, to analyze how business-critical applications are performing. This blog highlights five key metrics for optimizing application performance. 

In this blog we look at Red Hat, one of the market’s innovative enterprise Linux OS providers, and how Snapt’s standalone ADC solution, Snapt Aria, meets the needs of Red Hat deployments.   

If you’re running your business applications in containers and managing those with Kubernetes, you’re probably aware of the limitations of traditional Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) and Load Balancers in this environment. Traditional load balancers simply do not have the scalability and agility needed for cloud native deployments. Whether you’re already up and running in containers or just getting started, this blog will tell you all you need to know for choosing the best load balancer for Kubernetes.

If you're considering whether you can afford running more than one server for your business, you're likely to discover that you can't afford not to. Even with the additional operational expenses, you’ll be better off having redundant servers because redundancy minimizes downtime for your critical applications and reduces the costs incurred by outages, which can be huge. The price of downtime is always too high for any business. Like it or not, IT downtime is a fact of life. Systems fail. Outages happen. The failure rate of cloud servers is roughly 2% annually, for example. The larger the installation, the more frequently outages will occur. The best way to deal with these inevitable worst-case scenarios is to be prepared and minimize the downtime as much as possible.

Today’s workforce is increasingly mobile and remote, as many of us can now work effectively outside our traditional offices thanks to broadband connectivity, advances in networking technology and more capable mobile devices. Remote working not only increases employee productivity but also makes for happier employees who don’t have to contend with the stresses of commuting and can more easily balance work and life commitments. Companies that offer remote working are also more attractive to talented job seekers. But businesses need to be smart about how they support remote access to internal servers in order to minimize costs, prevent network downtime and provide secure connections.

Increased traffic on your website is a good sign that your business is doing well. It indicates that you’re getting more visitors and potential new customers to your site, selling more products or services and generating better engagement with your brand and business. But sometimes your site can experience a spike in traffic that will overload your web server, and even bring down your site, if you’re not prepared. Snapt has just published a helpful e-book on “How to Survive a Traffic Surge” that explains how surges are caused, the consequences for your business and the solutions for protecting your website.

Microsoft’s Internet Information Services (IIS) is one of the world’s most popular web servers for hosting just about anything on the web. A big part of the attraction, especially for companies that employ DevOps methodologies, is that it’s compatible with all Windows services and runs in Windows environments, which makes it easier to integrate and support business-critical apps. But IIS web servers can also put excessive strain on computing resources and slow down website response times.

Whether you’re a small startup, SME or large enterprise, if you’re a high-growth company you have aggressive targets to outpace the market. Your investors, employees and customers expect your business to sustain rapid revenue growth, and nothing should get in the way of that. To keep up the pace, your IT systems must be agile. When it comes to the critical task of load balancing that keeps your website and backend systems up and running, a software-based solution is the best way to ensure IT agility to support your business growth.

Businesses worldwide depend on Microsoft Exchange for a variety of communications applications from email services and collaboration tools to calendars. To ensure the performance of these critical business applications, Microsoft Exchange needs to be highly available to withstand outages, prevent downtime, and protect the system during maintenance and upgrades. It also often requires geographically redundant deployments for disaster recovery and the ability to fail over to backup sites if the system falters. To achieve high availability for your Exchange deployment, load balancing is essential. But what should you look for in a load balancer? Below we’ve highlighted the top four features your load balancer needs to keep your Exchange apps up-and-running and performing optimally.