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The latest News and Information on Monitoring for Websites, Applications, APIs, Infrastructure, and other technologies.

Observability Data vs Data Observability: What's the Difference?

Fun fact: Observability goes all the way back to the 1960s, coined by scientist Rudolf Kálmán as a way to measure a system through its output. Now, over six decades later, observability has fragmented into several specialized segments — from application observability, to security observability, and everything in between. The two segments driving the most confusion are data observability and observability data.

Playwright Explained

Playwright is an open-source framework for cross-browser automation and end-to-end web application testing. It was designed to be a fast, reliable, robust, and evergreen test automation framework, and its API supports modern rendering engines that include Chromium, WebKit, and Firefox. Playwright tests run on Windows, Linux, and macOS, locally or on your continuous integration pipeline, and headless or headed.

Shooting for the Stars: Achieving Optimal Network Performance through Cisco SD-WAN Network Monitoring

Greetings, fellow network administrators. The Force has led you here, to this article on the path to Cisco SD-WAN network monitoring. The art of network administration is not unlike that of mastering the ways of the Force - it requires patience, discipline, and a deep understanding of the interconnected systems at play. Warning! No characters were harmed in the making of this article. We seek to achieve perfect balance in all aspects of our lives, including our networks.

What is Latency? The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Latency: Why it Matters, and How to Minimize It

“Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?”― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy In today's digital world, we rely on fast and reliable internet connections for everything from business operations and communication. However, even the fastest internet connection can be slowed down by network delay, also known as latency.

Getting Started with Instant Evaluation

Learn how to leverage the Instant Evaluation feature within the SolarWinds Platform to easily trial and evaluate different solutions like Hybrid Cloud Observability. See how you can expand on the functionality available now and gain more integrated insights for streamlined issue resolution and performance monitoring in your environment.

Deploys Are the WRONG Way to Change User Experience

I'm no stranger to ranting about deploys. But there's one thing I haven't sufficiently ranted about yet, which is this: Deploying software is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad way to go about the process of changing user-facing code. It sucks even if you have excellent, fast, fully automated deploys (which most of you do not). Relying on deploys to change user experience is a problem because it fundamentally confuses and scrambles up two very different actions: Deploys and releases.

How to add context to errors with custom tags

An important component of understanding the root cause of an error, and the importance of an error to the business is having additional contextual information about the error. The specific additional data that is important for your errors will be unique for your application and possibly the category of the error. Rollbar provides an easy way to tag your error data with additional custom tags. There are 2 main ways of doing this.

Using Deduplication for Eventually Consistent Transactions

Deduplication is an effective alternative to transactions for eventually consistent use cases of a distributed database. Here’s why. Building a distributed database is complicated and needs to consider many factors. Previously, I discussed two important techniques, sharding and partitioning, for gaining greater throughput and performance from databases.

The Ultimate Guide to Website Monitoring for Small Businesses

As a small business owner, you know that a website is the backbone of your online presence. It's where potential customers go to find out more about your products or services and eventually choose to make a purchase. Besides that, it also significantly impacts your online presence and search engine rankings. But what happens when your website goes down? Or when it's running slow? This can negatively affect your business's growth, so you must always be aware of it.