Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

There is one universal truth about using Grafana: Dashboards are easy to create, but not-so-easy to organize. As organizations scale, there’s a high risk of unchecked dashboard sprawl, when dashboards become an unmanageable mess. As the number of users increase, so does their dashboard output. Our guide to dashboard management gives an overview of features that help with organizing dashboards, but there are still two pain points.

What's the first small thing to do in o11y that would teach me something, bring something valuable, and open the way for something else? Observability doesn’t have to be a big, company-wide project. It can be useful locally and individually. A little playing around can get you some crucial insight into how your software works. Try it as a team, or in a pair, or by yourself. It takes 3 steps: Step 1 is easy. The other two might take ten minutes, or maybe more like a day.

An old colleague of mine once said to me, “It doesn’t matter how inefficiently something DOESN’T work.” This was a joke used to make a point, so it stuck with me. It also made me consider that it does matter how efficiently something DOES work. Sometimes, when we have tools like Cribl Stream making things like routing, reducing, and transforming data so easy, we can forget that there might be a more efficient way to do it.

A common debate in software development focuses on whether to use already-available tools or services, which offer better developer productivity, or stick with lower-level tools or custom-built solutions, which offer more control and potentially better performance and flexibility. This can be boiled down to the decision of whether to build or buy. These two approaches are at the root of many current tech industry ideological conflicts.

From the moment Elastic announced plans to abandon a pure open source license for its Elasticsearch engine and Kibana dashboards in early 2021, there’s been a massive effort underway to create clear alternatives for the global community of active users. Logz.io has been an outspoken advocate and contributor to this work – fully embracing it as part of our product roadmap to best serve the needs of our customers, and preserve our long-term commitment to open source observability.

In this guide, we’ll explore the basics of using Express.js middleware. We’ll create a simple Express API from scratch, then add the middleware to it and demonstrate how to use each tool. The Express middleware tools we’re going to discuss are must-haves for your initial Express.js app setup. We’ll show you how to get started with them, and you can further configure them according to your application’s unique needs.

Modern video streaming workflows are composed of many different services, including encoders, origins, ad servers, content delivery networks (CDNs), and more. This wide range of options enables organizations to choose the tools that best fit their needs, but it also introduces considerable observability challenges. For instance, you may have limited access to the log data from each layer of your video workflow, and the data you can access likely isn’t standardized.

At first glance, availability monitoring may seem like one of the more mundane responsibilities of site reliability engineering (SRE) and IT operations teams. Determining whether an application is available may appear to be relatively straightforward, especially for teams that focus simply on monitoring certain transactions or services. This may have been true in the past.

Git integration has always been at the foundation of Stream. In the fall 2021 release of Cribl Stream (both on-prem software and Cloud), our Enterprise users have a received set of APIs to separate the development and deployment of Stream. Stream GitOps connects with your favorite git based versioning platforms and leverages their PR, approve/reject, and CI/CD workflows to push production-ready changes from a development branch into a main branch or release.