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.

Synthetic monitoring can be one of the most powerful tools in your DevOps team’s toolkit, especially for the SRE, yet is one that is often overlooked by people building out a reliability mindset. Synthetic monitoring permits you to simulate any transaction or interaction users can have in your website or app, from places around the world, as often as you’d like.

How easy is it to work with your security tools? So easy that you’re telling all your family and friends and you singing their praises from the occasional rooftop? Well, we sure hope so. Security tools, like any other tool, should help you save time, not waste it. Nobody would have invented a drill if screwdrivers were fast enough — but it’s also up to you to make sure you are using your drill and all the other power tools available in the modern world.

We’re excited to announce the general availability of the Mezmo Agent 3.6, which introduces Windows support to our Rust Agent. At the end of this blog, we’ll also highlight important updates to our Agent Deprecation schedule.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) is great for tracking the health and performance of your software tool. APM helps you understand what's happening inside your application by monitoring various parameters such as CPU/memory stress, internal network throughput, and more. However, mixing in log analytics can take your APM game up a notch. Almost all software tools generate logs when they run.

The question isn't whether an incident will happen: it's when it will happen. Systems will crash. Software will fail. Vendors will suffer an outage of their own. It's your job to be prepared for these problems, and incident severity levels are one of the tools you need. Incidents have varying impacts on your business and customers. Incident severity levels are how you classify their impact and manage your response.

It's always interesting to hear what feature requests dashboard users share with our product team. Sometimes it's big things — such as being able to set tokens on drilldowns — and sometimes it's little things. In Splunk Cloud Platform 9.0.2208, we've included a handful of Dashboard Studio "little things" updates.