Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In this post we will take a look at the icingadb check command built into Icinga 2 for monitoring the health of Icinga DB. If you have already configured it, this blog post will give you some insights on what it actually checks, otherwise, it showcases what useful health checks you are missing out on and should serve as a motivation to enable the check.

APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are the foundation of applications, facilitating communication between different services. To authenticate and secure these interactions, API keys and tokens play a vital role. However, improperly managing these sensitive credentials can lead to security vulnerabilities. In this blog, we will explore what API keys and tokens are, how to securely manage them, and best practices to use them across services while avoiding exposure.

Amazon S3 is a leading object storage service, but its pricing model, particularly for data egress, often becomes a significant burden for businesses with high outbound data needs. Cloudflare R2, a relatively new option, offers an attractive alternative with its simplified pricing and performance benefits. In this blog, we will explore why you should consider moving from AWS S3 to Cloudflare R2, compare their pricing with real-world examples, and provide a step-by-step migration guide with Node.js code.

Even with the best monitoring in place, outages are unavoidable. Complex, modern IT environments rely on multiple third-party services, including critical cloud and API providers, and when any one of those goes down, it can trigger a domino effect of increased error rates and latency spikes across your system. And, because you don’t have as much visibility into external services, it can be difficult to identify that the problem is due to an outside outage or disrupted service.

Understanding the cost of Azure resources at a granular level is critical for managing budgets effectively. With resources deployed across different resource groups-be it by teams, departments, or projects-tracking expenses can become complex. By analyzing costs per resource group, organizations can allocate ownership, identify cost spikes, and ensure accountability.

Top tips is a weekly column where we highlight what’s trending in the tech world and list ways to explore these trends. This week, we’ll look at three steps a business can take to protect themselves from disinformation. Over the past three years, your two-person startup has gained enough traction to turn into a 500-employee business. Your life’s work is materializing in front of your eyes, and it’s only uphill from here.

Several years ago—in 2016, to be exact—we decided to host the Checkly platform on Heroku, since it was the hosted cloud offering (at the time) that best aligned with our needs. In particular, we felt that Heroku offered the best PostgreSQL cloud offering available at the time.

DataDog and Prometheus are both popular monitoring solutions used to collect and analyze metrics and monitor the performance of systems, but Prometheus is open source and Datadog is proprietary. Datadog provides a unified platform for monitoring, troubleshooting, and optimizing modern cloud-native applications and infrastructure. Prometheus is the most popular tool for monitoring time series metrics. So, how to choose between Datadog and Prometheus?