Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Even if you don’t work with Prometheus day-to-day, you most likely have heard of it. After Kubernetes was donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), Prometheus became the second project to be incubated soon after. That was back in 2016 and it is still one of the most active CNCF projects. Why is it so popular? It’s the de facto monitoring tool for containerized workloads running on-prem and in the cloud – that is, it’s the monitoring tool for Kubernetes.

The Ingress NGINX Controller is a widely used Kubernetes component for managing HTTP and HTTPS traffic routing. While it provides powerful observability through Prometheus metrics, it’s also notorious for generating an excessively high number of time series. The root cause lies in how the controller labels its metrics—tracking requests across multiple dimensions such as ingress name, host, path, status code, and upstream response times.

Modern systems throw off a lot of data—metrics, traces, logs—sometimes more than we know what to do with. When you're trying to understand how values spread out over time (like response times, memory usage, or queue lengths), averages alone don’t tell the full story. OpenTelemetry histograms help fill in those gaps. This guide walks through what they are, why they matter, and how DevOps engineers can use them to improve observability in real systems.

Endre Sara is a Co-Founder of Causely, where he’s building a causal reasoning platform to continuously assure service reliability and eliminate human troubleshooting. Previously, Endre was VP of Advanced Engineering at Turbonomic and a VP at Goldman Sachs. At Causely, we believe observability tools shouldn’t just collect more data—they should enable you to understand it.

Anyone managing Microsoft Azure will be aware of how quickly its costs can escalate. As cloud architectures grow in complexity—spanning hybrid environments, multi-subscription setups, and cross-platform integrations—the need for intelligent cost visibility tools intensifies. With enterprises typically overspending by 25%-35% on their cloud resources, Azure cost reporting has become a big focus for organizations navigating cloud financial management.