Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Monitoring used to be simple—set up some dashboards, configure alerts, and call it a day. But with microservices and cloud-native systems, things aren’t so straightforward anymore. Keeping track of everything can feel like an endless game of whack-a-mole. That’s where observability comes in. If you’re just getting started or looking to refine your approach, this guide answers the most common (and important) questions.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a myriad of virtual servers to cater to almost any need you can think of. And the pricing reflects these options. Let’s dive right into it.

Conan is a leading software package manager for C/C++ development environments. As an open source multi-platform package manager, it is used to create, manage and share native binaries and their dependencies based on C/C++ code. C/C++ is often the preferred language for developing embedded systems, mobile platforms, and real-time applications due to its low-level control, high performance, and direct memory management capabilities.

In the face of increasingly complex, far-reaching network architectures, organizations continue to adopt Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) solutions to enhance network performance, security, and agility. Megaport Virtual Edge (MVE) offers a versatile platform that integrates with leading SD-WAN vendors, enabling businesses to deploy their virtual network functions seamlessly.

For over 15 years, Ribbon Communications and Cellusys have worked together to drive innovation in signaling solutions. Today, we’re excited to announce the next phase of our collaboration: Cellusys and Ribbon will be combining the strength of the Cellusys Signaling Firewall and Roaming platforms with the Ribbon DSC and STP though the purchase by Cellusys of a license of the source code to the Ribbon STP and DSC products.

Are you paying for colo space and/or power you’re not using? With colocation data center demand soaring, costs are rising, and vacancy rates are at record lows. Limited availability, coupled with increasing power and operational expenses, is putting financial pressure on businesses renting colo space.

HAProxy ALOHA 17.0 is now available, delivering powerful new features that improve UDP load balancing, simplify network management, and enhance performance. With this release, we’re introducing the new UDP Module and extending network management to the Data Plane API, a new API-based approach to network configuration. The Network Management CLI is enhanced with exit status codes and contextual help.

WhatsApp has become a major alerting channel for incident response teams. It's popular and for many, a great alternative to SMS. In our 2024 recap, we mentioned how Spike sent over 25,000 alerts on WhatsApp. It is now the 2nd most used alert channel for responders on Spike (rising from 4th spot in 2023). But... I will be the first one to admit – the WhatsApp alerts experience needed work to help responders react to incidents quicker!

At MetricFire, we love talking with engineers about their tech stacks, SRE challenges, and how they approach infrastructure monitoring. Recently, we had a great chat with Yoimer Roman from DinoCloud, a Latin American company that helps clients make smarter business decisions by leveraging AWS CloudWatch monitoring. Yoimer wears many hats: mentoring his team on all things AWS, designing custom cloud environments, and bridging the gap between technical challenges and non-technical stakeholders.

Serverless computing simplifies app development by abstracting away server management. Azure Functions provides a robust platform for event-driven, on-demand code execution. In this tutorial, we’ll create and deploy a Python-based Azure Function—one that parses incoming JSON—using CircleCI. For a more granular and enable programmatic access to Azure resources, we’ll use service principal for secure authentication and the Azure CLI orb to streamline our CI/CD pipeline.