Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

A Postgres database is one of the most complex pieces of software you run. It stores your data durably so a power loss doesn't lose a committed transaction. It hands out real transactions while thousands of queries fight over the same rows. It stays available when a node dies, lets you rewind to a point in time after someone drops the wrong table, and constantly tunes itself with background jobs. Two questions matter about all of that machinery: is it healthy right now, and will it stay healthy?

Most teams don't choose an observability deployment model, they inherit one. Someone signed up for a SaaS trial three years ago, telemetry volume grew 40x, and now Finance is asking why the observability line item is the fourth-largest infrastructure cost on the P&L. Or the opposite: a self-hosted Prometheus and Elasticsearch stack was stood up when the company had twelve services, and now it needs a team of two just to keep it upright while everyone else waits on slow dashboards during incidents.

A dropped call costs more than the interruption itself. It means a missed deal, a frustrated customer, or a support ticket that shouldn't exist. When VoIP quality slips, the usual first sign is vague: calls "sound bad" or "keep cutting out," with no clear starting point for troubleshooting. That vagueness is avoidable. VoIP call quality isn't subjective at the network level.

APIs power almost everything we use today, from cloud platforms and monitoring tools to ticketing systems and internal applications. But no matter how useful an API is, the response usually arrives as raw JSON. That's perfectly fine for machines, but much less convenient for people. Whether you're debugging an endpoint, exploring a new service, or building dashboards for your team, you'll probably want a better way to visualize that data. Fortunately, there are several ways to visualize API responses.

A recent IDC Spotlight report based on a survey of 685 public sector respondents found that 72% describe scaling AI from pilot to production as "very" or "somewhat" difficult.¹ Choosing the right model is only part of the challenge. Agencies also need to get their data ready for AI.

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 talking about boreout, the lesser-known cousin of burnout, and how to stay engaged as AI takes on more of the routine work. There was a time when finishing your work early felt like winning. Now it somehow feels... suspicious. You glance at your inbox and nope, there are no new emails.

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