Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Platform engineering is the practice of automating infrastructure operations and enabling self-service infrastructure capabilities within collaborative Dev, Ops and QA teams. It involves designing and building platforms, technologies and workflows that enable self-service capabilities to automatically manage, provision and operate complex modern software architecture environments.

If you’re part of the DevOps, SecDevOps, or IT team, you would agree that continuous monitoring of the entire IT systems and networks is vital. And this explains why 70% of businesses treat preventing downtime as a priority to avoid causing significant issues in the future. So monitoring your IT infrastructure constantly with a continuous monitoring plan is one way of improving efficiency and productivity.

The blog will take you through best practices to observe Kafka-based solutions implemented on Confluent Cloud with Elastic Observability. (To monitor Kafka brokers that are not in Confluent Cloud, I recommend checking out this blog.) We will instrument Kafka applications with Elastic APM, use the Confluent Cloud metrics endpoint to get data about brokers, and pull it all together with a unified Kafka and Confluent Cloud monitoring dashboard in Elastic Observability.

Databases are often the biggest performance bottleneck in an application. They are also hard to migrate from once being used in production, so making the right choice for your application’s database is crucial. A big part of making the right decision is knowing what your options are. The database landscape has been changing rapidly in the past few years, so this article will try to simplify things for you by going over the following topics.

If you’re responsible for overseeing a network infrastructure, but you’re not always on-site to complete tasks and tackle issues in person, you need the right tools to empower you in your admin efforts. There’s a diverse array of resources out there which will enhance your network management capabilities, even when you’re working remotely. Here are just a few examples of must-have apps for you and your team in this context.

In modern microservices-based applications, it is difficult to get an overview of how requests are performing across multiple services, infrastructure, and protocols. As companies began moving to distributed systems, they realized they needed a way to track requests in their entirety for debugging applications. Distributed tracing is a technology that was born out of this need.

SAP (Systems, Applications, and Products) is a popular enterprise resource planning (ERP) software used by businesses to manage various operations such as finance, human resources, and supply chain management. As businesses rely on SAP for their critical operations, it is essential that the software performs at an optimal level. Slow SAP performance can result in frustration, delays, and ultimately, reduced productivity.

In today's fast-paced business environment, maintaining a reliable and high-performing network is essential. One technology that can help achieve this goal is Meraki SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide Area Network), a cloud-based solution that enables organizations to easily manage and optimize their network performance. However, simply deploying SD-WAN is not enough.

As the world of technology continues to evolve, the demand for cutting-edge solutions to monitor and optimize system performance has never been higher. Today, we’re excited to introduce a revolutionary new concept in observability: Quantum Entangled Observability (QEO). This ground-breaking method leverages the peculiar properties of quantum mechanics to provide unparalleled insights into your systems’ inner workings.