When you plan monitoring strategies, the first thing you need to consider is the characteristics of the target systems. Depending on the resources you want to monitor, you will have to apply different architectural designs such as data collection, metrics generation, visualization, refresh schedule, and more. When you want to monitor network systems, making these considerations will allow you to achieve the right monitoring solutions.

Deep diving into the 'Normal accident' theory by Charles Perrow, and what it means for SREs.

We recently released our new website performance dashboards into the platform. Watch the introduction video with Head of Product, Bryn Dodgson and learn more about the dashboards below.

Are you considering taking payments online? Business is booming. E-commerce now accounts for $870 billion annually in the US alone, a 50.5% increase since 2019. But with more money comes more problems. In 2022, the Federal Trade Commission announced that 8.8 billion dollars were lost to fraud, with identity theft as the number one cause. Clearly, it has never been more lucrative - and more dangerous - to be in business online.

There has been an exponential increase in the adoption of Enterprise software for digital transformation. Enterprises are looking at Software as the key differentiator to render faster services to their customers. Remote and hybrid working has accelerated this trend, but tracking and managing these software licenses has become difficult. Check out how we reduce the software license cost through usage based application Optimization using Nexthink.

Preventing data loss for data in motion is a challenge that Cribl Stream Persistent Queues (PQ) can help prevent when the downstream Destination is unreachable. In this blog post, we’ll talk about how to configure and calculate PQ sizing to avoid disruption while the Destination is unreachable for a few minutes or a few hours. The example follows a real-world architecture, in which we have.

In the vast, mystical realm of the internet, where websites come to life and cat videos rule the land, there resides a hidden hero – Website Monitoring. Armed with lightning-fast reflexes and a vigilante’s keen eye, this unsung champion is the secret sauce to soaring traffic.

Feature management is an emerging set of tools and techniques for developing and testing software based around feature flags. It’s intended to increase productivity and performance, as well as improve software quality. Of course, you’ll also need to keep tabs on all those feature flags, so it only makes sense to pair feature management with observability for a more holistic view of your software development cycles.

This blog post was co-authored by Igor Shvartser, Senior Technical Product Manager at Amazon Timestream, and Michael Mandrus, Senior Software Engineer at Grafana Labs. Grafana Labs Senior Software Engineers Stephanie Hingtgen and Kevin Minehart also helped with the content.

Although microservices and cloud architectures are the new norm for modern applications, cloud cost optimization could run high in observability. High costs are largely due to the number of components involved in cloud architectures. According to Cloud Data Insights in a recent report, around 71% of IT companies say that cloud observability logs are growing at an alarming rate— a driving factor for rising observability costs.

In today's dynamic world of software development and system operations, making informed decisions and developing effective strategies rely heavily on data. The OODA loop, developed by military strategist John Boyd, consists of a recurring cycle: Observe, Orient, Decide and Act. This is then followed by a Feedback stage (not represented in the OODA acronym for some reason) before the cycle repeats itself, allowing for continuous optimization.

When it comes to debugging performance related issues, the range of these issues together with their root cause can be overwhelming to developers.

It’s never been a better time to be a Managed Service Provider (MSP). Why? Small and medium businesses (SMBs) use cloud-based services for their operations. Eighty-eight percent say they currently use an MSP or are considering one. But many obstacles remain even if SMBs are in high demand for MSPs. They need to keep their profits and revenue growing, focusing on cloud unit economics, customer pricing strategies, and efficient operations.

Native support for OpenTelemetry metrics in Prometheus.

What is Graphite? Simply put, Graphite is an open-source enterprise-ready time-series database. So what is a time-series database? Well, a time series is a series of data points indexed (or listed or graphed) in time order. Time Series databases have excellent benefits over traditional databases in terms of high performance, higher writes, improved scalability, better reliability, and many more.

Adaptive thresholding is a term used in computer science and — more specifically — across IT Service Intelligence (ITSI), for analyzing historical data to determine key performance indicators (KPIs) in your IT environment. Among other things, it’s used to govern KPI outliers in an effort to foster more meaningful and trusted performance monitoring alerts.

Okay, we are back for Part 2! Last time we discussed the new community Python library for InfluxDB 3.0. Let’s talk about a bolt-on application that uses the client library as the core of its development, the InfluxDB 3.0 Python CLI.

The process of adding new data to operations and security analytics tools is familiar to admins. New data onboarding can be a tiresome process that takes up too much time and delays getting value from the new data. The process typically begins with the admin engaging the data source owner, getting the wrong data sample, and then having to try again.

I’ve been working with Grafana Tempo for about half a year now, and one thing I like about it is that Tempo requires only object storage for storing traces, which is easy to set up in both cloud environments and on-premises. Another outstanding feature is TraceQL, which allows searching for relevant traces with a powerful query language.

Part 1 of the series of posts which talk about engineering design decisions to make high cardinality work in time-series databases.

On this SysAdmin Appreciation Day, we pause to honor the remarkable individuals who work behind the scenes and whose efforts power every problem solved, every seamless connection, and every technological success. They are the sysadmins—the unsung heroes deserving our heartfelt gratitude. Today, we express our gratitude to the masters of multi-tasking, the conquerors of crashes, and the champions of security—the beloved sysadmins! Your unwavering commitment to excellence inspires us all.

There are tons of tools to choose from when it comes to visualizing data, but Grafana has become one of the best ways for organizations to visualize information and get notified about events happening within their infrastructure or data. According to Kubernetes: In this article, we will take a look at the best practices for monitoring Kubernetes using Grafana.

As exciting as it can be to write new features in your ASP.NET Core application, our users inevitably encounter failed requests. Do you know how to troubleshoot IIS or ASP.NET errors on your servers? It can be tempting to bag on your desk and problem your annoyance. However, Windows and ASP.NET Core provide several different logs where failed requests are logged. This goes beyond simple IIS logs and can give you the information you need to combat failed requests.

In the previous blog in this series, we delved into the redesigned architecture of Amazon Prime Video and how they integrated different architectural styles for optimal performance and cost efficiency. We also discussed the impact of Amazon’s decision on the concept of a “serverless-first” mindset, highlighting the importance of considering alternative architectural approaches based on specific use cases and requirements.

Happy World Sysadmin Day 2023 Sysadmins are often the last resort when your office system crashes or when the network slows to a trickle. Every July, on the last Friday, professionals worldwide express their gratitude and celebrate our IT heroes, our sysadmins. On July 28, 2023, we thank sysadmins for what they do best: monitoring our IT systems and ensuring they are constantly up, fast, and secure.

DevOps is not just about operating software in production, but also releasing that software to production. Well-functioning continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines are critical for the business, and this calls for quality observability to ensure that Lead Time for Changes is kept short and that broken and flaky pipelines are quickly identified and remediated.

Ah, the age-old question of how to manage screen time for kids – it’s like trying to navigate a minefield of Peppa Pig, Paw Patrol, and PJ Masks! I mean, who knew Octonauts and Bubble Guppies would become household names? As a dad of two young kids, managing screen time is a balancing act, especially keeping our 5-year-old happy with access to her shows.

What is OpenTelemetry? Why is it important? Do SREs need to adopt OTel? An Explain It Like I'm 5.

For Software Houses, developers are as important as customers are to a retail organization – if the Developer Experience (DX / DevExp / DevEx) is poor, then work simply will not get done effectively and the best and the brightest are likely to leave for an employer who offers a better experience and hence, more productivity and job satisfaction. Long-term frustrated employees and staff attrition tend to impact product quality and lead to weaker software applications.

Earlier this week we shared some exciting news. Checkly has made its mark in not one, but two Gartner Hype Cycles reports. We're being recognized for something we're super passionate about - Monitoring as Code (MaC). This recognition comes in the Hype Cycle for Monitoring and Observability and the first ever Hype Cycle for Site Reliability Engineering. It's a big deal for us, and here's why it should matter to you, too.

If you’re new to logging, you might be tempted to collect all the data you possibly can. More information means more insights; at least, those NBC “the more you know” public services announcements told you it would help. Unfortunately, you can create new problems if you do too much logging. To streamline your log collection, you can apply some filtering of messages directly from the log source. However, to parse the data, you may need to use a Grok pattern.

Distributed tracing is a powerful technique that allows you to track the flow and timing of requests as they navigate through a system. By linking operations and requests between multiple services, distributed tracing provides valuable insights into system performance and helps identify bottlenecks. In this blog post, we will delve into the benefits of distributed tracing, explore its relevance for various application architectures, and uncover how it operates behind the scenes.

In addition to the built-in user authentication that utilizes usernames and passwords, Grafana also provides support for various mechanisms to authenticate users, so you can securely integrate your instance with external identity providers. We are excited to announce that with the release of Grafana 10.0, we have introduced a new user interface that simplifies the configuration of SAML authentication for your Grafana instances.

Did you like our previous blog about domain hijacking? Let’s see if you know all the HTTP codes now. There is a complex series of dialogues happening behind the scenes every time you use the internet. Your browser and servers are always communicating — and while most people don’t understand the internet’s language, it’s definitely essential for developers and SEO experts to understand it.

As mentioned in our ultimate guide to HTTP status codes, the HTTP 999 is unofficial, but it still plays an important role in the flow of our online journey in unexpected ways — and here’s why. So what is it for? We all know that the digital highway is held together by something called the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP.

Domain Driven Design (DDD) is usually associated with microservice architectures. As microservice architectures have been perceived as burdensome and overly complex, so too have organizations started to call into question the relevance of DDD initiatives. The argument is usually that unless an organization reaches a mega-scale that requires eventing to keep and micro-services to scale horizontally, such architectures are overkill.

This post gives an overview of how to build applications using the updated Docker + WASM technical preview, along with some observability best practices.

You know it’s going to be a great day when you find yourself mentioned as a Sample Vendor on the Gartner® Hype Cycle™ report for Monitoring and Observability, 2023(July 2023). The OnPage team is thrilled to share with its community that we have been mentioned as a Sample Vendor by Gartner on their latest Hype Cycle for Monitoring and Observability. OnPage is recognized as a Sample Vendor, specifically within the Automated Incident Response category.

ELB cost optimization- CloudSpend Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) is a load balancing service that automatically and evenly distributes incoming traffic from client-side applications across multiple virtual server instances, like Amazon EC2 instances, containers, or IP addresses, in different availability zones. It smoothly handles server instance failover and unavailability, thus increasing the application’s fault tolerance.

A webhook, or web callback, is a user-defined HTTP callback used to alter the behavior of a webpage or application. It is triggered by specific events in a web application, such as receiving an SMS message or phone call. When the webhook is triggered, the source application sends an HTTP request, usually in the form of a POST or GET request, to the URL configured for the webhook.

Imagine you're sitting in your office, and you start noticing emails coming in asking if you'd like to buy your domain. "Huh, that's weird, I already own that domain" you think to yourself. A few more emails come in, and they're getting past the spam filter, so you decide to double check your domain manager. Doubt starts creeping into your mind, you start panicking, and you frantically scroll down to where the domain should be, and... It's gone.

We recently announced the general availability of Icinga 2.14, which most of you might have noticed, and with that in mind, I’d like to show you how you can easily troubleshoot and eliminate some of the dependencies headaches known as the dependency cycle.

The rise of self-hosting has revolutionized the way businesses operate online. With organizations increasingly moving away from traditional hosting services to manage their own infrastructure, the need for effective monitoring solutions has become paramount. However, self-hosting monitoring poses numerous challenges that can make it a daunting task for many businesses.

Community Client libraries are back with InfluxDB 3.0. If you would like an overview of each client library then I highly recommend checking out Anais’s blog on their status. In this two-part blog series, we do a deep dive into the new Python Client Library and CLI. By the end, you should have a good understanding of the current features, how the internals work, and my future ideas for both projects.

As a leader in IT, the question of whether or not it makes sense to adopt a dedicated software troubleshooting solution probably comes up from time to time. If it's happened in your organization — no worries — you're not alone. Many teams wonder if their current tools, such as an Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solution or a suite of open-source solutions are sufficient.

Fastify is a cutting-edge web framework for Node.js that offers exceptional speed and efficiency. With its extensible plugin system, support for asynchronous programming, and focus on minimalism, it is an ideal choice for backend developers developing Node.js applications. But even the most performant web applications can encounter issues that are difficult to debug without the proper tools in place. We will explore how to use AppSignal for a Fastify application.

Research published by Cisco AppDynamics highlights the challenges that IT teams are facing in managing application availability and performance within hybrid IT environments. The new report, The Age of Application Observability, reveals the levels of complexity that technologists are encountering as they implement cloud native technologies alongside existing on-premises applications and infrastructure.

Oh, I beg you, can I follow? 🎶 Now you can, but don’t have to. Let’s see what’s new. Hi folks! Even the sizzling summer can’t stop our groove. We’ve been busy mixing up some cool updates just for you!

Honeycomb's Refinery is a tool that customers can use to help manage the volume of their telemetry. It's rare to have too much telemetry—it's not often that someone says "I wish I didn't have all this information!" However, telemetry is data, and data is not necessarily information—particularly when you’re drowning in it. Honeycomb's query engine is so fast and powerful that many customers can send us all their telemetry.

SD-WAN is a reliable, fast, and secure WAN network. In this guide, you’ll learn some best practices for planning, monitoring, analyzing, and managing modern SD-WANs.

In this article, we will take a look at what Graphite and Grafana are and what they are used for. Some people might mix these two up, but they do completely different jobs when creating a monitoring system. Let’s take a look these tools in more depth.

In the observability space, it seems like everyone is talking about how to reduce costs and control the explosion of Prometheus metrics. It’s no wonder — our recent analysis of user environments suggests 20% to 50% of metrics generated are never used, but users are still stuck paying for them.

The growing popularity of IoT devices has revolutionized the way we interact with technology. From smart homes to industrial automation, these devices have become an integral part of our lives. However, managing and monitoring a large fleet of IoT devices can be a daunting task. With the sheer volume of data being generated by these devices, it becomes crucial to have a robust monitoring system in place.

Collectd is a data collection software that allows you to fetch metrics from a machine being monitored locally and push them to Graphite. Everything is done by plugins. The collectd plugins can collect metrics on CPU, memory, Postgres, JVM, and many more metrics. Plugins can also be used to push these metrics to Graphite, aggregate data, send alerts, and send notifications to email.

Whenever we detects something wrong with your site it can send you a notification. We have multiple channels available: Slack, Telegram, webhooks, and many more. The most popular channel our users use is just a simple mail. Behind the scenes, Oh Dear uses Postmark to send out mails. Postmark will inform us whenever a notification mail results in a hard bounce. A hard bounce means that the mail won't be delivered. The most common reason for this is that the mailbox doesn't exist (anymore).

OpenTelemetry vs. Prometheus - Difference in architecture, and metrics.

Building and supporting a video game project is challenging. It is a complex and intricate process that balances difficult time constraints and ambitious goals while keeping a highly engaged and demanding user base happy. Game developers need every advantage possible in the development and support process to succeed. One of the best ways to ensure that a game is successful is to make sure that every shipped version of the game project contains as few crash-causing defects as possible.

Streamlined user experience, expanded monitoring capabilities, faster root cause analysis, and enhanced performance and security.

In today’s digital landscape, website performance is paramount. To ensure seamless functionality and reliability, businesses rely on Synthetic Monitoring tools. While Pingdom has been a popular choice, it’s essential to explore alternative solutions. In this article, we’ll dive into the top alternatives to Pingdom in 2023, examining their advanced features, functionalities, and integration capabilities.

As businesses embrace more cloud-native technologies and IT infrastructure becomes more dispersed, they must connect their business goals and end-user experience with the availability and performance of their IT infrastructure. This change necessitates infrastructure monitoring to assure compatibility with cloud environments, operating systems, storage, servers, virtualized systems, and other components.

Let’s face it: when it comes to Digital Experience monitoring, the customer is always the first thing organizations focus on. They are the ones who give the organization their reason to exist, and their satisfaction determines the organization’s future. The link between revenue and good Customer Experience is obvious, so it’s a hot topic of interest and often the top priority – as it probably should be.

It’s been about 8 months since we first launched Cribl Search. For our early adopters, it’s been a game changer, and with each monthly release, we continue to innovate — expanding access to new datasets and adding new functionalities. If Crib Search is new to you, here is a quick recap. Cribl Search flips the observability data search paradigm on its head. You no longer have to collect, ingest, and index your data before you can search it.

The latest versions of Elastic Observability’s most popular observability integrations now use the storage cost-efficient time series index mode for metrics by default. Kubernetes, Nginx, System, AWS, Azure, RabbitMQ, Redis, and more popular Elastic Observability integrations are time series data stream (TSDS) enabled integrations.

Elastic Search 8.9 introduces hybrid search with Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF) to combine vector, keyword, and semantic techniques for better results. This release also brings performance improvements in vector search and ingestion with response times that are up to 30%+ faster. Users also have more ingestion options with the new SharePoint Online connector, which includes document-level security.

Kubernetes has emerged as the de facto standard for container orchestration, with its ability to automate deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. However, even with the best practices and expertise, Kubernetes deployment can sometimes be a complex and challenging process. It involves multiple layers of infrastructure, including the application, Kubernetes cluster, nodes, network, and storage, and each layer can have its own set of issues and challenges.

I’m thrilled to announce that Gartner added Monitoring as Code (MaC) as an emerging practice into their Hype Cycles for Monitoring and Observability and Site Reliability Engineering. We are extremely hyped about this recognition and being listed as a vendor innovating in that space. Since we founded Checkly, our vision has been that monitoring should be set up as code and live in your repository; it must be open-source based and feel natural for developers.

As businesses increasingly migrate to the cloud, the ability to monitor these environments becomes critically important. Digital Ocean is a popular choice for developers due to its simplicity and scalability. However, effectively monitoring resources and applications within Digital Ocean can pose unique challenges. Hosted Graphite and Telegraf provide powerful solutions for these challenges, allowing users to visualize data, track system metrics in real time, and troubleshoot issues quickly.

In this article, we’ll cover our newest feature- Microsoft Teams notifications! We’ll walk you through how to set it up, and we’ll take a look at why we are constantly making the MetricFire experience better.

Interest in generative AI and large language models (LLMs) has exploded in popularity thanks to a slew of announcements and product releases, such as Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, OpenAI’s DALL-E, and ChatGPT. The arrival of ChatGPT in particular was a bellwether moment, especially for developers. For the first time, an LLM was readily available and good enough that even non-technical people could use it to generate prose, re-write emails, and generate code in seconds.

Software vendor management is difficult. You've probably experienced it. The service desk is flooded with tickets about a specific application. Employees are frustrated. Your EUC team investigates but can’t find the root cause. So, you reach out to the vendor. Then the inevitable happens: the vendor responds with “Everything is green from our perspective”. Yet, the issues persist. Tickets continue to come in. Frustrations continue to mount.

We are pleased to announce the latest upgrade to Rollbar’s usage visibility tools - a comprehensive notification system. Following our commitment to continuous improvement, this new feature will provide immediate alerts about usage milestones via email and Slack. The newly added 'Notifications' button can be found at the top right corner of the Rollbar usage page.

In this post, we will compare two of Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) most popular computing services: AWS Lambda and Amazon EC2. Both services offer unique advantages and can be used for different purposes.

A PHP application might produce many different levels of warnings and errors during its execution. Seeing these errors is crucial for developers when troubleshooting a misbehaving application. However, many developers often encounter difficulties displaying errors in their PHP applications, leading to silent app failures.

DevOps and DevSecOps have gained more attention in recent years in the world of software development. While both of these methodologies emphasize the agile development process and team collaboration, there are some key differences that distinguish them. Understanding these distinctions is critical for software development teams and organizations to determine which methodology is best suited to their requirements. In this article, we’ll learn about the difference between DevOps and DevSecOps.

If you take a glance at LinkedIn, Twitter, or any tech-focused social content these days you're bound to see people talking about something called "DORA metrics". So what are DORA metrics? What value do they provide? And how can you get started with them?

When I was still writing code, our Splunk license only had enough capacity to monitor our Production environment. So we stood up a self-managed Elastic cluster for our lower environments. This quickly became unmanageable as we started logging more and adding additional environments. As I spend more time in the field, I see this pattern repeated over and over.

We’re excited to introduce a dedicated Grafana Cloud solution for Apache Mesos, an open-source project for managing clusters in your data center and at cloud scale. Apache Mesos is a distributed systems kernel, running on every machine in a cluster and providing easy orchestration of every resource in the cluster. This allows you to treat compute units, memory, and disk as a single pool of resources.

How AppDynamics APM, Cloud Native Application Observability and the Cisco FSO Platform can provide a full-stack, holistic view of application performance, user experience, security posture and business impact. Recently, a customer asked me how Cisco’s investment in full-stack observability benefits traditional AppDynamics customers. To answer, first, let’s take a moment to discuss how Cisco AppDynamics fits into Cisco Full-Stack Observability.

As an SRE, have you ever had a situation where you were working on an application that was written with non-standard frameworks, or you wanted to get some interesting business data from an application (number of orders processed for example) but you didn’t have access to the source code?

The recent Microsoft Inspire 2023 event unveiled a ton of exciting updates and enhancements for Microsoft Teams. As Microsoft rolls out these new features, the need for performance monitoring becomes ever more essential – but we’ll get to that in a bit. First off, let’s get started with what some of the exciting new changes are for Teams, and how they can help businesses everywhere.

In today's digital landscape, network management is more important than ever. As businesses continue to expand and increase in complexity, so do their networks. Aruba switches play a vital role in this ecosystem by providing reliable, high-performance networking solutions for enterprise-level organizations. However, effective monitoring of these switches can be a challenge without the right tools at your disposal.

Understanding the impact of digital employee experience allows IT leaders to get a sense of the maturity of their organization, set goals and drive improvements based not on trial and error, but on clear evidence derived from organizational data. Let us now gain insights into DEX of the organization using Nexthink Experience Central.

Salt Security had deployed OpenTelemetry but found it insufficient. So the company engineers evaluated Helios, which visualizes distributed tracing for fast troubleshooting. My role as the Director of Platform Engineering at Salt Security lets me pursue my passion for cloud-native tech and for solving difficult system-design challenges. One of the recent challenges we solved had to do with visibility into our services. Or lack thereof.

The lack of proper insights can make diagnosing incidents difficult. Another factor that can contribute to this is agents having to switch between various tools to remediate user issues. The delay in ticket resolution and escalations drives up AHT and MTTR causing the service desks to struggle.

What do you do when things break in production? Debugging microservices isn’t a walk in the park. Microservices are designed to be loosely coupled, which makes them more scalable and resilient, but also more difficult to debug. When a problem occurs in a microservices app, it can be difficult to track down the source of the problem. When the problem is in production, the clock is ticking and you have to resolve the issues fast.

Since Oh Dear was launched, we offered a traditional login using the familiar email and password combination. Today, we've launched our social login. This feature allows you to use your Google or GitHub account to log into Oh Dear. You'll see these two new buttons on the registration and login page. When clicking one, we'll use your Google or GitHub account to log in. When logging in, we'll search for an Oh Dear account whose email matches the email used for your Google / GitHub account.