Development teams build modern applications using microservice architectures. Individual services are built and maintained by separate teams, and then these services are combined using container-based orchestrators to comprise a complete product offering. Microservices are a standard development method because they allow teams to iterate releases, providing ongoing new customer-facing features and bug fixes without needing to redeploy an entire platform or app.

Monitoring IT infrastructure and services has always been an essential IT prerequisite. However, your IT monitoring system and security measures need to upgrade with an exponential increase in the number of remote users post-pandemic. For instance, consider this: At the end of a work day, you are notified that one of your critical services has gone down. But the problem is that five teams support different processes of that service.

The Cambridge English Dictionary defines a silo as “a part of a company, organization, or system that does not communicate with, understand, or work well with other parts.” Siloing can exist at various organizational levels: siloed departments, siloed teams within a department, and even siloed engineers within a team. In any industry, siloing can cause issues with alignment, communications, and overall delivery, but in fintech, there are additional risks.

When building alerts, engineers aim to create accurate, timely, and actionable alerts. In pursuit of this goal, many engineers will leverage PromQL throughout their careers. PromQL is the query language used by Prometheus and Alert Manager to query metrics and define alerting rules. While PromQL works very well for simple use cases, as infrastructure scales, architectural patterns grow more complex, engineering practices accelerate, and alerting use cases become more multivariate.

In the observability toolchain, all of our efforts go into data storage and analysis, and the usability of our system becomes a second-class citizen. Autocomplete is a crucial usability feature that significantly improves the developer experience. It is ubiquitous amongst engineering tools from IDEs to CLIs. Autocomplete has long been a feature of many observability tools, but they all miss a crucial detail – optimizing for developer productivity.

Have you ever tried to find a bug in a multi-layered architecture? Although this might sound like a simple enough task, it can quickly become a nightmare if the system doesn’t have proper monitoring. And the more distributed your system is, the more complex it becomes to analyze the root cause of a problem. That’s precisely why observability is key in distributed systems. Observability can be thought of as the advanced version of application monitoring.

Akka’s license change has surprised many of us, but it didn’t come out of nowhere. Lightbend recently announced that Akka will be transitioning from an “Open Source” license to a “Source available” license called BSL 1.1. Let’s unpack this to understand what it all means.

Stateful, commonly monolithic, and absolutely fundamental to system design, the quality of your database administration and operation is a key determinant of your overall success. Databases are the cornerstone of modern architecture, requiring constant effort, investigation, and iteration to get the most out of a database. This makes it all the more terrifying when an outage occurs.

The way organizations process logs have changed over the past decade. From random files, scattered amongst a handful of virtual machines, to JSON documents effortlessly streamed into platforms. Metrics, too, have seen great strides, as providers expose detailed measurements of every aspect of their system. Traces, too, have become increasingly sophisticated and can now highlight even the most precise details about interactions between our services. But alerts have remained stationary.

Alerting has been a fundamental part of operations strategy for the past decade. An entire industry is built around delivering valuable, actionable alerts to engineers and customers as quickly as possible. We will explore what’s missing from your alerts and how Coralogix Flow Alerts solve a fundamental problem in the observability industry.