Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Observability solutions can easily and rapidly get complex — in terms of maintenance, time and budgetary constraints. But observability doesn’t have to be hard or expensive with the right solutions in place. The future of your observability can be a bright one.

Last October, Splunk Observability Evangelist Jeremy Hicks wrote a great piece here about the Four Golden Signals of monitoring. Jeremy’s blog comes from the perspective of monitoring distributed cloud services with Splunk Observability Cloud, but the concepts of Four Golden Signals apply just as readily to monitoring traditional on-premises services and IT infrastructure.

Grafana Loki is an open source logs database built on object storage services in the cloud. These services are an essential component in enabling Loki to scale to tremendous levels. However, like all SaaS products, object storage services have their limits — and we started to crash into those limits in Grafana Cloud Logs, our SaaS offering of Grafana Loki.

When Dolly Parton sang about “Workin’ 9-5”, she almost seemed to understand the very specific pain of sitting at an IT help desk and getting one last call at 4:59 in the afternoon. When you pick up that last call of the day, the last thing you want is to begin a long, arduous investigation.

As modern IT systems grow more elaborate, encompassing hardware and software across hybrid environments, the prospect of managing these systems often grows beyond the capacity an IT team can handle. Automation is one great way to help. But it's important to know that not all automation is the same — chatbots are probably not the solution your team is looking for to handle these incredibly complex systems.

“When you peel back business issues, more times than not, you will find that the root cause is directly tied to data problems,” says Matthew Minetola, CIO at Elastic®. In today's world, all companies, new and old, are awash in data from multiple sources — stored in multiple systems, versions, and formats — and it’s getting worse all the time.

HAProxy offers a powerful logging system that allows users to capture information about HTTP transactions. As part of that, logging headers provides insight into what's happening behind the scenes, such as when a web application firewall (WAF) blocks a request because of a problematic header. It can also be helpful when an application has trouble parsing a header, allowing you to review the logged headers to ensure that they conform to a specific format.