Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Modern applications rely on dozens of third-party services to function properly. When these services fail, your application fails too. DevOps teams need to identify and monitor the top SaaS vendors that could impact their infrastructure and user experience. This guide covers the essential SaaS vendors DevOps teams should monitor, organized by category and criticality. We'll explore why each vendor matters and what specific aspects require monitoring.

In the last few months we've made some changes to VMs that finally allow installing and running Windows on them. MS Paint on Cycle is finally a reality. To make Windows VMs work, we had to add a few things to the platform to support it. As always with Windows, there are some quirks, gotchas, and pain points. But in the guide below, I'll show you how we solved these issues in our recent platform update, and how to install and run a Windows Server 2025 VM on Cycle with full network connectivity.

2025 was the year we at Grafana Labs went all-in on AI—and boy, what a year it was. Not only did we establish and start to execute our overarching strategy (build actually useful AI), we also took one of our most exciting new features (Grafana Assistant) from idea to general availability in just nine months! Yes, there's no shortage of articles singing the praises of AI these days, but let's dispense with the hyperbole and focus on some actually useful content.

Getting started with observability in a modern, fast-moving environment is harder than it should be. Open-standards-based observability promises flexibility and vendor neutrality, but in practice it often introduces significant complexity and delays meaningful coverage by months or even years. Each layer of the stack requires its own instrumentation approach, and every technology, runtime, and library version comes with unique setup steps, tradeoffs, and rough edges.

The air in the operations world is thick with AI and LLMs. EVERY vendor is rushing to slap an “AI-powered” badge on their product. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: In high-stakes Kubernetes operations, one bad AI recommendation can destroy months of trust-building in an instant. We aren’t building a chatbot to suggest recipes. We are building systems that, armed with kubectl permissions, have the potential to take down production with a single, wrong command.

If you search for “OpenTelemetry Agent”, you will likely encounter two completely different definitions. This ambiguity often leads to confusion between infrastructure teams and application developers. SREs and DevOps engineers would describe it as a component deployed as a sidecar, whereas application developers would understand it as a language-specific library. Let’s break it down in the next section.

Modern.NET applications rely on three primary Web API architectures: lightweight REST APIs, middleware-driven ASP.NET Core Web APIs, and contract-heavy WCF SOAP services. Each exposes functionality over HTTP, but each behaves very differently in production. More importantly, each architecture fails in different ways, which means teams must monitor them differently to maintain reliability, uptime, and predictable performance.

Looking for a reliable SolarWinds alternative? If you’ve been comparing SolarWinds and WhatsUp Gold, you’re not alone. Many IT teams are evaluating which network monitoring solution offers better performance, flexibility and cost efficiency. In this guide, we’ll walk you through a step-by-step migration from SolarWinds to WhatsUp Gold, highlighting key differences, benefits and best practices to maintain a smooth transition.

Grafana’s MySQL datasource makes it easy to turn raw database rows into clean, interactive dashboards. Whether you're testing out a new monitoring setup or experimenting with time-series data, MySQL + Grafana gives you a powerful foundation for building visualizations quickly.

We shipped some big updates this week!