Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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.

The 17th century saw the onset of the Scientific Revolution. It was a time of knowledge explosion. During this time, scientific practices were still evolving, with no universally accepted protocols for data collection and analysis. Individuals documented any observation, resulting in the collection of massive amounts of information, but much of it was hard to leverage to draw useful conclusions. The development of the scientific method provided a common approach to capturing and analyzing data.

One of my favourite authors, Douglas Adams, once said that “we are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.” Whilst Adams is right about a lot of things, he got this one wrong – at least when it comes to infrastructure. As our Infra Masters 2025 event demonstrated, infrastructure is the technology that makes everything work – from managing a satellite in outer space, to, say, livestreaming an event.

Internal developer portals (IDPs) have become essential tools in platform engineering, helping standardize developer workflows and reduce friction by providing self-service access to tools, APIs, and infrastructure. During my time on a platform team, I experienced firsthand the transformative power of IDPs. Our team implemented custom solutions that significantly reduced load on developers, allowing them to focus on writing code rather than navigating complex infrastructure.

Modern applications rely on numerous interconnected endpoints to function properly. Maintaining visibility into these critical connection points is fundamental to both system reliability and security. When endpoints fail, degrade, or become compromised, the impact cascades to users, teams, and ultimately affects your bottom line. Effective endpoint monitoring provides the visibility needed to prevent these issues.

Modern systems throw off logs like confetti—and making sense of all that noise is half the battle. OpenTelemetry logging offers a way to bring some order to the chaos. It helps DevOps teams collect logs in a consistent format, no matter what language or framework they’re working with. In this guide, we’ll walk through what OpenTelemetry logging is, why it matters, and how to put it to work in your stack.

AI is no longer just a buzzword. According to a 2024 McKinsey survey, 72% of companies now use AI in at least one area of their business. By 2027, nearly all executives expect their organizations to use generative AI for both internal and external purposes. However, with this rapid adoption comes significant security risks. As organizations rush to implement AI solutions, many overlook a critical vulnerability: prompt security.