Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

A marathon runner who trains obsessively on a flat track will have beautiful split times right up until race day when they discover the actual course has hills. Although the preparation was real, their strategy was flawed. This plays out in SLO teams more than anyone likes to admit. At first, numbers look fine and nothing has been triggered. Then, a support ticket comes in showing checkout has been down for 20 minutes. The SLO wasn't broken.

Azure monitoring looks straightforward when managing a single environment. Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Azure Monitor Agent and Azure Policy provide a comprehensive set of tools for collecting and analysing telemetry. For a Managed Service Provider (MSP), however, the challenge changes significantly when the service needs to support dozens or hundreds of customers.

Why does the VPN work for most of the company while one branch office, or a handful of remote staff, reports that it won't connect or crawls the moment they sign in? The difficulty with VPN troubleshooting is that the tunnel relies on every layer below it. If the laptop, home Wi-Fi, internet route, gateway, or security policy on either end misbehaves, the connection suffers. One complaint about a slow file share could originate at any of those points.

An IT incident costs the most in the minutes between the first alert and the first owner. Incident management tools exist to shrink that window. However, choosing the best incident management tools is not as straightforward as we’d like it to be. The 2026 market has its own complications, Opsgenie is going away on April 5, 2027, and Squadcast has been folded into SolarWinds.

AI agents can fail even when your website looks healthy. See how WebMCP monitoring uses synthetic tests to validate the full agent journey, from tool discovery to backend response.

We’re excited to launch the StatusGator mobile app for iOS and Android, designed to put outage alerts right in the palm of your hand. Your StatusGator status page is the central hub for your entire organization to view and understand the status of all your services. These pages have always been accessible on mobile. Now, with the dedicated app, end users of your status page can take the services they depend on with them and receive updates directly on their phones.

Top tips is a weekly column where we highlight what's trending in the tech world and list practical ways to explore these trends. This week, we're looking at how to search the web more effectively and find the information you need faster. Searching the web can feel a little like playing hide-and-seek. You know what you're looking for is somewhere out there, but the internet has an impressive number of places to hide it.

Every growing business hits a moment of truth somewhere between "we just launched" and "we just lost a customer because our site was down for 40 minutes." It's then that you realize the free monitoring tool you set up six months ago—the one that felt more than adequate at the time—is no longer pulling its weight.

How to monitor a PHP application in production: reading the PHP-FPM status page, checking OPcache health, and finding the request that is actually slow. Sejal Pandey works on content and growth at Last9, writing about observability, reliability, and SRE practices.