The Applications Manager team recently wrapped up one of our favorite events of the year—O’Reilly Velocity Conference. The four-day gathering in San Jose gave us a chance to come face to face with a huge assortment of industry experts and leaders.
The conference targeted DevOps and system professionals who wish to build and manage distributed and resilient applications. Without a doubt, the hottest topics at the conference were DevOps and monitoring.
We’re still trying to wrap our heads around all the information we picked up at the event, but here are a few things that stuck with us as important takeaways.
The containerization industry is growing by leaps and bounds
Another theme at Velocity that was closely tied to DevOps and monitoring was containerization. Kubernetes was a hot topic, especially as it’s slowly becoming the industry standard for deploying containers in production environments. At the end of the day, utilizing containerized deployment is another way to improve scalability, ease container management concerns, and reduce delays in communication. Attendees were happy to know that Applications Manager supports performance monitoring for container deployments.
There’s a secret to building amazing dashboards
There was a lot of buzz at Velocity around the need for business-oriented dashboards and how they can help with monitoring deployment patterns. One session focused on utilizing dashboards to view the entire code flow of web applications, perform dynamic baselining for commonly used transaction flows, and logically group transactions within web services.
That same evening, there were talks on the importance of choosing a polling frequency and how sometimes even a one-minute polling interval is insufficient. One presenter emphasized the repercussions of choosing the wrong sampling period, especially how that can skew data interpretation.
Attendees were impressed with the fact that Applications Manager provides built-in dashboards that make it easier for businesses to put together all their critical applications and view their performance alerts in one place. They were delighted to know that with four different dashboards (default, business view, availability, and QOS worldwide), Applications Manager makes data analysis quicker, easier, and much more relevant.
When it comes to booths and swag, vendors don’t mess around
The event planners behind Velocity clearly took the proverb “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” to heart. What other IT industry event starts with a 5k run to energize the crowd? We had our share of fun in between sessions too, with games of spin the wheel and spot the differences, as well as raffles. We took selfies with human-sized mascots, tried our luck at some games, and won a lot of free goodies like PopSockets, power banks, and screen cleaners.
Overall, we had a blast at Velocity this year, and we can’t wait for the next one.
