Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

One of the great powers of Grafana is the open source community behind it — a community that provides a breadth of ready-to-use dashboards, plugins, exporters, and instructions that make a million tasks easier. The sheer scale of it all means whatever you need probably already exists somewhere. To illustrate this, I want to share an example of how to use these tools as a base for building a comprehensive database monitoring solution.

Imagine a world where packets go on unexpected detours, performing an electrifying dance routine that challenges the order we hold dear. Sounds intriguing, doesn't it? In the realm of data transmission, order is king. But every now and then, our trusty packets decide to take a detour, throwing caution to the wind and leaving us scratching our heads. Fear not! Today, we embark on an exhilarating exploration to demystify the phenomenon of out-of-order packets, also known as packet reordering.

When it comes to monitoring your network, website, and third-party services, StatusGator offers a unique and comprehensive solution. Unlike traditional network monitoring tools, StatusGator complements your existing infrastructure by providing visibility into over 3,900 third-party cloud services and hosted web applications.

Thursday evening, Microsoft 365 identified a global outage affecting users accessing various Microsoft 365 applications and services. Impacted users suffered from login issues, Azure hosted virtual machines not being available, and constant loading screens in Microsoft 365 services, just to name some of the issues.

What if your have already implemented tracing but lacks robust metrics capabilities? Enter SpanConnector: a tool that bridges this gap by converting trace data into actionable metrics. This post details the workings of SpanConnector, providing a guide on its configuration and implementation.

The recent global outage caused by an operating system update reminded me of how vulnerable we are today and most importantly, how close we are always teetering on global scale incidents with millions of interconnected dependencies. When the base of the house collapses, everything built on top is impacted. Those of us in IT Operations, Monitoring, Observability (insert the current acronym), etc., know firsthand this risk; we face it every day.

Chaos testing is a part of site reliability engineering (SRE). In chaos testing, we intentionally break things in and around a given application, in order to: The purpose of chaos testing is to assess how software systems respond to scenarios like network outages, hardware failures, database failures, and server or cluster node failures in the infrastructure.