Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Today’s IT environments are rarely confined to a single data center or a single cloud provider. Enterprises are embracing a mix of cloud platforms, virtual machines, and on-premises hardware to stay agile and competitive. This blended environment is known as hybrid IT infrastructure, and managing it effectively is key to keeping systems healthy, secure, and performing at their best.

At Grafana Labs, we’ve always believed that observability should be open and accessible — that belief extends beyond metrics, logs, and traces to the costs associated with managing observability at scale. That’s why we’re excited to share that we’ve adopted the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification ( FOCUS), a community-driven, open standard for cloud billing data.

Data is the lifeblood of businesses the world over, from the smallest startup to the largest enterprise. Making sure that it’s available when you need it, secured for authorized use, and recoverable from faults is vital to operating data platforms, no matter where your business is on its cloud journey. This can only be achieved by putting the right data into the hands of the right people, in a timely way, to make the right decisions about how to manage that platform effectively.

Legacy systems now falter against modern requirements like scalability, security, and emerging technologies such as AI, containers, and microservices. In fact, experts project that by 2026, 90% of current applications will need modernization to remain viable, signaling an urgent call for business leaders to respond. While rebuilding from scratch with the latest technology stack might seem appealing, this approach demands significant time and investment.

AWS and Cloudflare often come up together when teams are building, securing, and scaling web applications. While they originally served different purposes, their offerings now overlap in key areas like content delivery (CloudFront vs. Cloudflare CDN), edge compute (Lambda@Edge vs. Workers), DNS and WAF, and API delivery. In this guide, we’ll explore what each platform does best, when to use one over the other, and see if you can combine both for optimal speed, security, and cost efficiency.

As there are many cloud providers available, when searching for the right solution, getting the best performance is likely at the top of your list. Without a solid cloud performance foundation, businesses can run into all sorts of problems, such as outages, network lag, loss of customers, and reputation. To help avoid these barriers, we will analyze what factors you should consider from your provider's cloud performance metrics so your business can handle and manage data without interruption.

Google Cloud Next is the biggest event of the year for the Google Cloud community, showcasing the latest and greatest offerings from Google Cloud and hundreds of its partners. As a long-time Google Cloud partner and recipient of three Google Cloud Partner of the Year awards in 2025, Datadog was there in full force, delivering several speaking sessions and running a booth on the expo floor where we met with thousands of attendees. In case you missed it, don’t worry.

The cloud offers many benefits, including scalability, cost savings, and operational efficiency. But here’s the deal. Organizing, monitoring, and controlling a cloud environment can become complex as workloads, applications, services, and underlying infrastructure grow. Businesses can better control and monitor their cloud infrastructure services, resources, and data using cloud management software.