Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Synthetic monitoring is a means to monitor applications, pages, APIs, etc., from the user’s perspective so you can best understand how they perform for actual users. IT professionals use synthetic monitoring to run simple uptime checks and to monitor complex, mission-critical business transactions. Synthetic monitoring tools also allow you to test and monitor third-party applications, which can impact how your users experience your websites and web applications.

For most enterprise NetOps teams, a discussion about the WAN is a discussion about the cloud. Whether it’s as simple as ensuring solid connectivity with a SaaS provider or designing a robust, secure, hybrid, and multi-cloud architecture, the enterprise wide area network is all about connecting us to our resources, wherever they are.

Implementing SLAs, SLIs, and SLOs is essential for effective monitoring and maintaining optimal system performance. As companies grow, they may add a significant number of KPIs that burden their IT assets, leading to system sluggishness and employee complaints. Developers must balance business needs with IT processes, and SLAs, SLIs, and SLOs can help them achieve this balance.

Today’s enterprises must have the capability to cope with the growing volumes of observability data, including metrics, logs, and traces. This data is a critical asset for IT operations, site reliability engineers (SREs), and security teams that are responsible for maintaining the performance and protection of data and infrastructure. As systems become more complex, the ability to effectively manage and analyze observability data becomes increasingly important.

Elasticsearch is a popular search engine that can be used to swiftly and almost instantly store, explore, and analyze huge volumes of data. It offers a distributed, multitenant full-text search engine with an HTTP web interface and schema-free JSON documents on top of Apache Lucene. In this tutorial, we will demonstrate how to communicate with an Elasticsearch cluster using a Python Elasticsearch client.

It’s been a minute since our last Feature Focus, and we have a bit of catching up to do! I’m happy to report we’ll resume monthly updates next month, but until then, please enjoy this super-sized winter digest of what we’ve been up to at Honeycomb.

If you’ve been keeping a close eye on the RapidSpike platform, you’ll know that in the past few months, we’ve released a bunch of really useful website monitoring features and upgrades that make using the platform even more intuitive. Learn about the new Setup Wizard and our other new features below.

Legacy systems often present a challenge when you try to integrate them with modern monitoring tools, especially when they generate log files that contain personally identifiable information (PII) and IP addresses. Thankfully, Grafana Cloud, which is built to work with modern observability tools and data sources, makes it easy to monitor your legacy environments too.