Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Let’s be honest—your database isn’t just another component. It’s the thing holding everything else together. When it slows down or fails, the ripple effects hit fast and hard. So keeping an eye on its performance? Non-negotiable. The challenge is, there’s no shortage of metrics you could monitor. But not all of them are useful.

Staring at a monitoring dashboard and still feeling like you're missing half the picture? Happens more often than you'd think. Especially when you're dealing with metrics like request durations or payload sizes—data that doesn’t behave nicely or fit into neat little averages. This is where Prometheus' histogram buckets step in. They're not just another metric type; they're a better way to track the messy, uneven world of performance data.

Deciding between on-premise vs. cloud solutions is one of the biggest IT infrastructure choices businesses face today. Both options come with their own advantages and trade-offs. The right choice depends on your company’s needs, resources, and long-term growth plans. In this guide, we’ll break down the key differences between on-premise and cloud-based network management, covering factors like cost, security, scalability, and ongoing management.

Many engineers would agree: migrating to a new observability platform can be a serious undertaking. But it’s also the perfect opportunity to step back, revisit some of the foundational practices that drive your observability strategy — and reap some major benefits, as a result. This was the case at SpotOn, a provider of restaurant point of sales systems and business software, which recently migrated from four disparate observability tools and consolidated on Grafana Cloud.

When an app breaks and there's no clear clue why, debug logs often hold the answers. They record what the code was doing at each step, making it easier to trace back and spot what went wrong. This guide covers what debug logging is, why it’s useful, and how to use it without turning logs into a wall of noise.

In the AI world, there’s a lot of buzz about creating custom large language models (LLMs) tailored for specific domains, perhaps for better security, context, expertise, or accuracy. It’s an appealing idea: What better way to solve your niche challenges than with a bespoke AI designed just for you? But here’s the thing — building a great LLM isn’t just challenging; it’s prohibitively expensive and resource-intensive.

Blind spots in frontend monitoring can occur when you’re managing complex modern applications. Browser and device variability, user journeys with intricate workflows and multiple touchpoints, and ephemeral frontend components can all create visibility gaps that make it difficult to identify, understand, and resolve the issues impacting user experience.

Modern code profilers gather performance data that is highly useful for developers, but the traditional presentation of that data can be challenging to interpret for engineers who are new to profiling. For the Continuous Profiler team at Datadog, our guiding mission is to make profiling a standard practice for all developers by flattening its learning curve and helping teams quickly gain insights into application performance.

The 2025 Gartner Market Guide for Event Intelligence Solutions arrives at a critical time for organizations facing increasing complexity in managing IT events. Today’s diverse, distributed IT environments create significant operational challenges – alert fatigue, fragmented tools, and slow incident response – impacting both efficiency and customer experiences.

I was lucky enough to attend KubeCon Europe 2025 in London, where the energy around OpenTelemetry (OTel) reached fever pitch. From packed sessions to buzzing hallway conversations, it’s clear: OpenTelemetry isn’t just the future—it’s the present. Here’s what stole the spotlight.