Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

AI systems, from machine learning models to Large Language Models (LLMs) and autonomous AI agents, introduce unique observability challenges. Their non-deterministic nature, complex dependencies, and specialized performance characteristics require thoughtful instrumentation approaches. OpenTelemetry has emerged as the leading standard for implementing observability across these systems.

Developed by Microsoft in the 1980s, SQL Server is a relational database management system designed to help store, retrieve, and manage data. SQL Server’s strong data processing capabilities, robust security, and high scalability make it an excellent option for enterprise environments that need to process high volumes of advanced analytics, transactions, and more. Data availability is vital for businesses of all sizes, so organizations strive for high availability (HA).

In our increasingly serverless world, observability isn’t just a “nice to have”—it’s essential. Serverless functions such as AWS Lambda bring incredible benefits, but they also introduce complexities, especially around monitoring and debugging. In a previous article, I provided a quick, practical guide for sending AWS Lambda traces to Grafana Cloud using OpenTelemetry.

Over the past decade, businesses have realized that relying solely on their data centers has limitations. That’s why 38% of organizations turned to private clouds in 2024 to control their data. However, as the need for more flexibility and scalability grew, they started integrating public cloud services. In this article, we’ll explore hybrid cloud computing, what it is, how it works, and why it’s a hot future trend for businesses.

Cybersecurity threats don’t exclusively come from external attackers—insider threats must also be considered and mitigated. Insider threats come from employees, contractors or business partners who have legitimate access to IT systems to fulfill business functions. They have access to data and systems that are valuable to cyberattackers or would cause reputational damage if disclosed outside the organization. For example, an insider could leak private company information.

Let’s start with a blatant truth: If we tell you that AlertBot offers “superior customer support,” then you are perfectly within your rights to respond with a tepid “meh,” or perhaps an irritated “so what?” Why? Because EVERY COMPANY in this industry claims to offer amazing customer support. Of course, many of them provide mediocre customer service, and a few of them deliver awful customer service.

Elastic Observability 9.0/8.18 announces several key capabilities: Elastic Observability 8.18 and 9.0 is available now on Elastic Cloud — the only Elasticsearch offering to include all of the new features in this latest release. You can also download the Elastic Stack and our cloud orchestration products — Elastic Cloud Enterprise and Elastic Cloud for Kubernetes — for a self-managed experience. What else is new in Elastic 9.0/8.18? Check out the 9.0/8.18 announcement post to learn more.

AI agents are everywhere in the headlines—and yet no one seems to agree on what they actually are. Ask five companies what it means, and you’ll get five different answers: So yeah—no wonder people are confused. At the highest level, everyone agrees on this: AI agents are systems designed to act on behalf of a user. But that’s where the agreement ends. The big differences come down to how independent they are, how intelligent they really seem, and what kind of work they can do.