Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Profiling is emerging as a core pillar of observability, aptly dubbed the fourth pillar, with the OpenTelemetry (OTel) project leading this essential development. This blog post dives into the recent advancements in profiling within OTel and how Elastic® is actively contributing toward it. At Elastic, we’re big believers in and contributors to the OpenTelemetry project.

How your software applications perform is an extremely important factor in determining end-user satisfaction. APM metrics are the key indicators that help business-critical applications achieve peak performance. This article explains APM metrics, their importance, and the core APM metrics used by modern software systems to measure and optimize the performance of their applications.

Somewhere in the IT multiverse, a perfect balance has been achieved between demand for IT services and installed system capacity. Unfortunately, that isn’t our world. IT systems operate in swing periods of idle capacity and overloads, as the ebb and flow of demand is influenced by various internal and external factors.

Organizations like yours are increasingly reliant on complex IT infrastructures to support their operations. Pervasive use of Kubernetes and microservices architectures continues to up the ante. Amidst this complexity, achieving comprehensive visibility into systems and applications has become both imperative for ensuring performance, reliability, and security, while also becoming ever-more challenging to achieve.

In an IT environment with multiple alerting channels and notifications, it is easy to become overwhelmed and desensitized to alerts. This tendency to avoid or respond negatively to incoming alerts is alert fatigue. Alert fatigue is a crucial issue in IT teams, with the sheer volume of alerts generated by modern IT systems. You might prioritize the first five alerts you receive in a workday. Maybe even up to the tenth alert. But is the twentieth alert as important?

IoT (Internet of Things) is the overarching term used to describe the extensive network of devices connected to the Internet. This term covers a broad range of objects or ‘things’ from consumer technology such as smart home lighting to crop management in agriculture. IoT allows everyday devices to effectively connect and exchange data with one another.

At observIQ, we are big believers and contributors to the OpenTelemetry project. In 2023, we noticed project awareness reached an all-time high as we attended trade shows like KubeCon and Monitorama. The project’s benefits of flexibility, performance, and vendor agnosticism have been making their rounds; we’ve seen a groundswell of customer interest.

Organizations today face a growing list of obstacles as they try to improve their detection, coverage, and accuracy. For one, data proliferation is happening at an astronomical rate. When was the last time your network bandwidth went down? What about your license costs for data storage or your SIEM? Difficulties arise from overlapping and poorly integrated tools that generate disparate data streams and several operational efficiencies.

Now, many teams are incorporating microservices architecture, with this trend only continuing. This allows them to employ their applications across distributed environments. Whilst this is advantageous as it makes it much simpler to build, scale, and deliver it can also become much more challenging to monitor and troubleshoot the components that make up the environment.