Navigating your first days as an environment manager with Blackfire
Step confidently into your new role as an environment manager with our latest guide, designed to navigate your first days with Blackfire. From setting up your environment to managing access controls, we cover the key responsibilities that will help streamline your processes and optimize your team’s productivity.
By Thomas di Luccio, on Jul 12, 2023 Welcome to the latest entry in our ongoing beginners’ guides series–crafted to help you navigate through your early days with Blackfire. With these guides, we aim to facilitate a swift and seamless onboarding process for every user within your organization, whatever roles they have in your observability and performance process.
This article zeroes in on the critical role of environment managers, offering a blueprint for Blackfire. As an environment manager, you have two primary responsibilities: ensuring your environment is correctly configured and controlling the accesses to this environment. Your primary objective is to ensure the day-to-day work with Blackfire is as smooth as possible for your team members and you.
The nitty-gritty of environment configuration
The environment configuration panel can be accessed by clicking on the “environment settings” entry in the menu.
As a first configuration level, you can name the environment, flag it as a production or development one, and provide a valid endpoint. The development flag provides a useful context when using Blackfire on local setups, as specific recommendations targeting configuration will then be ignored. Note that staging, tests, Q/A should be considered as production environments.
Defining an endpoint for that environment is required to use Blackfire Builds and synthetic monitoring. Blackfire provides extensive ways to profile your application following custom-made scenarios programmatically. Builds can be triggered manually, periodically, or automatically through webhooks and integrations.
The environment credentials can be accessed and eventually regenerated from the environment settings. You can also find them in our documentation. Please note that Blackfire’s documentation is uniquely personalized. To mitigate errors and enhance developer experience, your credentials are already populated in the installation and configuration procedures.
You can also control the monitoring settings of your environment and define the notification channels used by the alerting and the synthetic monitoring.
Access control: decide who shall pass
As an environment manager, you can invite and revoke environment members. This control ensures the right access levels and fosters an efficient, productive workspace by ensuring everyone on your team can safely work on improving the performance of their applications.
Please note you cannot revoke the environment owner nor promote a contributor to be environment manager. Only the organization admins can perform those operations.
I hope you are confident to succeed in your new environment manager role and get a clear view of your priorities and objectives.
Keep an eye out for our upcoming posts, where we’ll delve deeper, rolling up our sleeves and embarking on a practical exploration of observability and performance. The journey is just beginning, and we can’t wait for you to experience what comes next.
Remember, this is an ongoing journey, and we encourage you to join the conversation on Dev.to, Slack, Reddit, and Twitter. Our community is also a great place to start, share your experience and learn from fellow observability specialists and performance nerds.
Happy Performance Optimization
