Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

If you’re operating modern, data-driven applications—which, let’s face it, you likely are—Kafka serves as the central streaming platform, delivering data in real-time. It’s impressive, extremely fast, and exceptionally powerful for achieving high throughput and scalability. But here’s the catch: with significant power comes the need for vigilant oversight. Neglecting your Kafka environment is like driving a racecar with your eyes closed. It’s bound to end badly.

Holiday shoppers are notoriously impatient, and in 2025, they’re increasingly impatient when it comes to slow websites. Keywords like “website downtime tracking” and “ecommerce site reliability” are often trending because businesses are realizing that slow is the new down. This holiday season, the goal is to safeguard your website against business-critical slowdowns without adding “manual monitoring” to your already busy plate.

We're launching a ServiceNow integration in early January that brings Obkio's network monitoring capabilities directly into your IT service management workflow.

This year, the world leaned heavily on words like reimagine, rebuild, renew, reshape, and reinvent, and the same spirit defined our journey. As promised last year, we reimagined key capabilities, reshaped workflows, and restructured critical parts of our network monitoring tool to meet modern demands. At the same time, we reinforced the core foundation you've trusted for more than a decade: delivering reliable, usable features with uncompromising security.

This year-end wrap-up covers topics from BGP security (including ASPA and excessive AS-SETs) and the geopolitical (Ukraine’s IPv4 exodus, the Iran internet shutdown, and Red Sea cable cuts) to the year’s most significant outages (TikTok, the Spain/Portugal blackout, and cloud failures at AWS, Azure, and Cloudflare). Plus, we explore Starlink’s new Community Gateways, and revisit the evolving landscape of AS ranking and OTT service tracking.

Connecting nearly a billion professionals is no small feat. It requires an infrastructure that puts the user experience above everything else. At LinkedIn, this principle created a massive engineering challenge: delivering a fast, consistent experience across various use cases, from the social feed to real-time messaging and enterprise tools.

December has arrived. The change freeze is looming, and the holiday requests are likely piling up in your inbox right now. It is the natural time for you to look back at the last twelve months, not just to measure your team's performance, but to consider how much the game itself has changed. If you look at the trajectory of your industry this year, a clear pattern emerges. You didn't just face new technical challenges; you faced a genuine shift in what it means to manage a network. The old metrics broke.

The cloud landscape is no longer just about "getting to the cloud"—it is about mastering the complexity once you are there. For organizations using VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), the stakes have never been higher. As infrastructure converges, the margin for error shrinks, and the need for precision grows. To understand how the industry is navigating these changes, we dive into the VMUG Cloud Operations and VCF User Experience Report 2026.

Aviation across the Asia-Pacific (APAC) and Middle East (MID) regions continues to rebound and modernise, bringing new pressures on airlines, airports and air navigation service providers (ANSPs). This increase in air traffic, more complex airspace and the need for safer, more efficient operations mean that seamless, secure information exchange across borders is essential.