Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

We are thrilled to announce that the Cortex Model Context Protocol (MCP) is now available in the Devin marketplace. This integration connects the world’s first AI software engineer with the real-time context of your entire engineering ecosystem, as managed and measured by Cortex. The rise of AI software engineers like Devin fundamentally changes how organizations tackle their biggest technical challenges.

Artificial intelligence is everywhere: in keynotes, press releases, product announcements, and quarterly roadmaps. From help desk chatbots to predictive analytics, AI is being positioned as the silver bullet for almost every IT challenge. But under the surface, most IT leaders are asking a much more practical question: What’s actually real?

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) helps you understand how your software runs in production. When you track the right metrics, you see how requests move through your system, where slowdowns happen, and how resources are being used. With this knowledge, you can spot issues early and keep your applications reliable for your users. In this blog, we discuss the key APM metrics to monitor, grouped into categories, and why each one matters for performance and user experience.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides more than 200 services. Among those, Amazon Elastic Compute Service (ECS), Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and AWS Fargate help deploy and manage containers. Choosing between these services can be challenging. They seem similar on the surface (and are all popular). But each offers unique benefits and limitations. In this guide, we compare the three services, discussing the best use cases for each, and helping you choose the best fit for your business.

If you manage Kubernetes at scale with Rancher, you know that UI performance is not just a “nice-to-have”—it’s crucial for productivity. The Rancher team is on a continuous journey to enhance our platform’s ability to handle increasingly complex environments. In this post take a deep dive into an exciting, evolving improvement we’ve been developing: a project codenamed “Vai” (also called UI Server-Side Pagination or SQLite-backed caching).

Microservices make it tough to understand how applications behave end-to-end. Most teams already rely on an Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tool to track system health. But as requests move across many services, you also need distributed tracing. Jaeger gives you that visibility. The real value comes from connecting the two. Instead of running APM and Jaeger in silos, you can combine their strengths, metrics from your APM, and traces from Jaeger, to get a clearer view of performance.