TiDB, an open-source, distributed SQL database, provides detailed monitoring metrics through Prometheus and Grafana. These metrics are often the key to troubleshooting performance problems in the cluster.
However, for novice TiDB users, understanding hundreds of monitoring metrics can be overwhelming. You may wonder:
With the Auto Scale for VPC, you can create an instance group to scale according to your requirements. Based on the target utilization metrics that you define, the instance group can dynamically add or remove instances to achieve your specified instance availability.
Let’s start with a quick one, as an introduction to VPC.
When I first started following Charity on Twitter back in early 2019, I was quickly overwhelmed by the new words and concepts she was discussing. I liked the results she described: faster debugging, less alert fatigue, happier users. Those are all things I wanted for my team! But I was hung up on these big polysyllabic words, which stopped me from taking those first steps toward improving our own observability.
This post is my attempt to help orient folks who want to learn more about observability but maybe feel overwhelmed or intimidated by the vocabulary list, like I did. My goal is to get everyone on the same page about what these words mean so that we can focus on leveraging the tools and ideas to build better software and deliver more value!
Plugins offer a ton of benefits to developers and website administrators; from flexibility, to saving time in development, the right plugin is priceless to a project.
In this article, we’ll cover a list of the best new plugins for October 2020. You’ll find useful plugins for WordPress, Craft, Shopify, and Joomla.
Let’s get started.
Sticky Post Expire is a simple plugin for WordPress that allows you to add an expiration date to your sticky posts. When the expiration date you set on a post expires, the post will automatically no longer be sticky. All you need to do is install/enable the plugin and a meta checkbox will appear in your posts admin area. It’s in this checkbox you will set the post’s expiration date.
The Product Page Shipping Calculator plugin allows your customers to calculate the cost of shipping before adding the product to their cart. The plugin also allows customers to see the available shipping methods for their area. If the product cannot be shipped to the customer’s location, the plugin will notify the customer. All calculations are done using Ajax, so you don’t have to worry about the plugin slowing down your site.
Payment Page makes it easy to collect payments on your WordPress website. The plugin allows you to connect to any payment gateway platform of choice. You can also receive one-time or recurring payments using Payment Page. The plugin comes with beautifully designed templates that you can customize to fit your brand and style. The form builder helps you increase your sales and conversions. You can collect payment in any currency. After payment, customers will also receive a confirmation message.
Wp Roadmap is a product feedback board for WordPress. The plugins allow you to display your company’s product roadmap on your WordPress website or blog. The plugin will display your new products, business developments, upcoming events, achievements, awards, and future projects on your site. WP Roadmap also gives you the option to collect and create feedback boards. The plugin comes with an intuitive interface and works with any WordPress theme.
LiveSession is a session replay plugin for WordPress. The plugin allows you to record everything happening on your site, including clicks, scrolls, and mouse movements. This plugin helps you understand how your visitors interact with your website. You can rewatch the videos as many times as you like. Instead of recording every single visitor on your site, LiveSession will record visitors with a high engagement score.
The plugin also comes with a feature called Rage Clicks. This feature helps you identify when visitors encounter Javascript errors. The plugin also has a beta feature called Clickmap. It helps you identify the specific elements on your site that visitors clicked and how many times. There is also a heatmap feature that identifies which pages on your site get the most interaction. The plugin is very useful in improving your user experience (UX) and conversion rates. It easily integrates with Google Analytics, Segment, Intercom, LiveChat, HelpScout, Olark, Wix, Shopify, and WooCommerce.
Auction Feed makes it easy to display eBay items on your WordPress website. Visitors to your website will be able to search and buy products directly from your site. The plugin comes with a variety of styles to fit any WordPress theme. You can also add a product description above or below the product image. Customers won’t have to leave your website before making their purchases. The plugin is also free to use.
Floating Related Posts is a WordPress plugin that allows you to display a banner with a list of related posts on your website. The banner can appear at the top or bottom of the web page. You can set the banner to pop up using a time filter or scroll trigger. The plugin is also compatible with Google Analytics. You can customize the banner background color, font size, button style, and text color. The plugin can be translated into any language.
The Simple Restrict Content plugin allows you to restrict the content that visitors can access on your WordPress site. You can choose who can access content on your website by setting up roles. The simple lightweight plugin restricts different content types, including, posts, web pages, and WooCommerce products. The plugin is available in Spanish and English.
Easy Video Publisher is a WordPress plugin that allows you to easily publish YouTube videos on your website. You can import YouTube videos from multiple channels. You can also schedule the YouTube videos to automatically upload to your website. Note that a YouTube API key is needed to import multiple videos at a time from a specific channel. The plugin allows you to use multiple API keys.
Preloader Awesome is a preloader plugin for WordPress that allows you to create a page preloader interface while the rest of the webpage is still loading. Preloaders are interface elements that notify visitors that your website hasn’t crashed, just processing before serving content. Some of the features of the plugin include 14 page transition styles, progress bar, GIF support, 10+ default CSS loader, progress status counter, unlimited color, and counter font size options. The plugin is responsive and works on all modern browsers.
The Menu Hover Effect plugin allows you to add hover effects to the menu bar on your website. With this plugin, you don’t need to learn CSS. This plugin gives you 20 CSS menu hover options to choose from. It is a lightweight plugin and won’t affect your website speed.
The Better Comments plugin allows WordPress users to easily customize the comment section of their website. With the plugin, you can customize the look of your comment form fields, match the submit button with the colors of your site, and hide the comment’s date. The plugin also allows you to create a comment policy section. You can further customize the comment fields to highlight when they are selected and typed in. If you find rounded avatars common, the plugin also offers a hexagonal avatar option.
WP Pocket URLs is a handy WordPress Plugin that helps you manage your affiliate links. The plugin allows users to automatically shorten and track any affiliate link on their website. You can also manually shorten the links on your website. Each time a visitor clicks on a link you get access to information like click date/time, country, IP address, etc. You can also categorize your links and also create custom permalinks. There is also a dashboard widget that displays your top 10 links. On the “Reports” page, you can generate clicks reports. You can filter the reports by Month/Year, link category, country, and link title.
Formie is a Craft CMS plugin that allows you to create user-friendly forms. The plugin comes with a drag and drop builder for creating forms. You can store user form submissions in your control panel in case you want to review them later. When a user submits a form, you will get an email notification. Formie also has an in-built keyword blocking feature to protect you from spam. The plugin has several integrationS: API for Elements, Address Providers, Captchas, CRM tools, Webhooks, and Email Marketing software. You can also create your custom integration. You can add over 25 fields to your forms using Formie.
Craftagram is a Craft CMS plugin for adding any Instagram feed to your website. Since the plugin uses the official Instagram API, you don’t have to worry about your website getting blacklisted. Craftagram also handles pagination for your Instagram feed.
We’re Open is a handy plugin for Shopify users. The plugin lets your customers know when you are open to receive new orders. Once your business hours are close, customers won’t be able to make new orders. A message will be displayed in your store that you are closed. The plugin ensures that you only receive orders when you are open. It works in any time zone and the API easily integrates with mobile apps.
Punch Metrics is a Shopify Plugin that helps you track your store’s visitors and also analyze their behavior. The plugin offers real-time data on your site’s visitors, the pages that see the most engagement, and which devices are the most popular. You can also record and replay visitors’ sessions so you can know exactly what they did on your site. Punch Metrics also has a heatmap tracking feature to understand which elements on your site get the most clicks.
Simple Sliders is a content plugin for Joomla. The plugin allows users to easily create accordion sliders in their articles. You can add the sliders to your Joomla articles by adding this code:
{slider title="Slider 1 Title" class="blue"}
Slider 1 content.
{slider title="Slider 2 Title" class="red"}
Slider 2 content.
{/sliders}
Jitsi Conferencing is a video conferencing plugin for Joomla. The plugin will allow you to host meetings and easily connect with your clients. The module is simple and effective to use.
Featured image via Unsplash.
We live in an era of reliability where users depend on having consistent access to services. When choosing between competing services, no feature is more important to users than reliability. But what does reliability mean?
To answer this question, we’ll break down reliability in terms of other metrics within reliability engineering: availability and maintainability. Distinguishing these terms isn’t a matter of semantics. Understanding the differences can help you better prioritize development efforts towards customer happiness.
Disclaimer – I am not in any ways affiliated with Sonar Source, I just happen to be using their product(s), and the stuff I’ve seen so far, is simply amazing as far as I am concerned!
As software developers, we are non-stop fighting the never ending recurring battle against "code rot". Code rot often implies that our Program Manager asks us for a feature, and we sneak in an additional "if" statement in one method, and a couple of "while" statements in another method, and our program manager is pleased with the effect. Slowly over time of course, the effect this approach has on our code, is less cohesion, clarity, and readability, in our classes, methods, and modules – And our code slowly mutates over time to become "a big ball of mud", until it reaches that point where it’s no longer possible to maintain.
Distributed SQL databases combine the resilience and scalability of a NoSQL database with the full functionality of a relational database. In this Refcard, we explore the essentials to building a distributed SQL architecture, including key concepts, techniques, and operational metrics.
Source de l’article sur DZONE
When analysts for professional sports teams noticed that marketing promotions that included the team’s logo vastly outperformed similar creative assets that featured player imagery — something which, to the casual observer, this may simply sound like good analyst work — it showed something significant: creatives rarely receive an analytical assessment of their work.
More than half of creatives say they rarely…get qualitative performance data about the creative content
Those analysts didn’t just stumble upon that insight. The feedback loop — where someone is dedicated to evaluating the creative used in marketing campaigns and feeding the data back to designers — was the result of a concentrated effort to improve the creative process, workflow and by extension, organizational culture.
More than half (55%) of creatives say they “rarely” or “never” get qualitative performance data about the creative content they’ve produced. Less than one-in-five creatives (17%) receive such feedback “always” or “often.” That’s according to our research, as published in the 2020 In-House Creative Management Report, which was conducted in partnership with InSource, a professional association for in-house creatives.
The 2020 In-House Creative Management Report revealed that 89% of respondents think creative work is important to meeting business objectives. Similarly, 87% said their organization is giving them the same or more credit for the business results their work delivers for the organization.
How can a creative team improve what it does for a business if they never see how their work influences market behavior?
Those statistics are encouraging since creative teams have been asked to do more and more — with the same or fewer resources — for years. However, to sustain this positive relationship with marketing and business leaders, creative teams will need to find quantitative ways to demonstrate their value. The feedback loop strengthens the strategic relationship creatives have with their business leaders.
So how can creative value be measured? Efficiency and effectiveness are the two primary approaches.
Measures of efficiency center on output. Efficiency aims to quantify requests, project by volume, type, requestor, and per designer, completion times, cycle times, cause of delays, and rounds of revision.
Such measures are essential for making a case for the resources the creative team needs to get the work done. In our research, most in-house creative teams are at least thinking about output metrics. This is a good start but it’s just the beginning.
Measures of creative effectiveness are the next level in organizational sophistication. The creative process doesn’t end when a project has been approved. Instead, there’s a feedback loop that still needs to be completed – performance metrics must be shared with the creative team. How can a creative team improve what it does for a business if they never see how their work influences market behavior?
Importantly, the benefits of sharing performance data goes beyond process improvement. It spreads to the overall culture which strengthens the partnership between creatives and marketing.
As Brent Chiu-Watson, a product leader at Adobe, wrote, measures of efficacy lead to a “mutual interest in understanding creative effectiveness.” In turn, cross-functional collaboration improves and the whole team begins “to provide better insight through dialogue.”
When marketing organizations are interested in measuring creative, there is often more emphasis on measures of output than there is effectiveness. Sometimes, what gets measured is what’s easy to measure. There are several reasons for this:
“There is an old adage that you can choose quality, speed or cost, but not all three. Sometimes two, but never all three,” says Adam Morgan, an executive creative director for Adobe, who contributed to the 2020 In-House Creative Management Report. “So, we say the most important thing is quality creative, but then we measure on speed and efficiency.”
Fortunately, Adam and several other big thinkers in the creative space offered some ideas for approaching this business problem.
“Two thoughts come to mind when you see creative teams not getting feedback on their work. First, does that data even exist? The marketing team might not be collecting it because they haven’t defined success metrics,” wrote Ilise Benun, a speaker, author and business coach for creative professionals at Marketing Mentor.
“Second, the marketing team has data, but they aren’t providing it. In that case, the creative team has to make it easy for the marketing team to pass that data over. Define what those metrics are at the beginning of the project, and then set up the project so that you can collect that information or have direct access to it at the end of the project.”
“In general, teams that are earning their seat at the strategic table are probably also more connected to data. But I don’t think that the creative department should get swamped down in endless metrics,” says Adam.
“Use this as an opportunity to build a strategic partnership with even more departments within the organization who are already focused on measuring performance.”
“It’s important to remember that operational metrics are key to showing the impact creative work has on the business,” says our very own Molly Clark, who heads our marketing team. “Creatives will strengthen their relationship with the business by becoming analytical creatives – the best combination of data-driven and creative.”
The design team for the professional sports organization, at the beginning of this piece, were surprised by their analysts’ findings: most usually agreed that player imagery is visually more compelling. However, the organization built a feedback loop into the creative process that put combined analytics and creative to drive better business results.
Featured image via Unsplash.
Between November 2008 and December 2014, I transitioned from senior software engineer to dev team lead to Director of Engineering to VP of Engineering at CloudLock. During that time we grew from one office with 5 devs to four offices with 75 devs.
Let’s just say it was a crazy 6 years :-)
