Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Since we launched Grafana Mimir — the most scalable, most performant open source time series database in the world — we have answered many of your questions about our latest open source project, including how to pronounce it. (All together now: /mɪ’mir/.) We have walked through how we scaled Grafana Mimir to 1 billion active series. And we will be hosting webinars to showcase cutting-edge features like query sharding and the two-stage compactor.

Ah, good question! TL;DR: Trace instead of log. Traces show connection, performance, concurrency, and causality. Logs are the original observability, right? Back in the day, I did all my debugging with `printf.` Sometimes I still write `console.log(“JESS WAS HERE”)` to see that my code ran. That’s instrumentation, technically. What if I emitted a “JESS WAS HERE” span instead? What’s so great about a span in a trace? Yeah, and so do logs in any decent framework.

Lots of organizations do not pay attention to their assets and pieces of equipment, who is using them and where are they located. These are particularly important questions but usually, they are ignored as a result assets are lost and nowhere to be found when they are required. Lots of employees waste their time finding the required assets and pieces of equipment. It also leads to delayed production work. Overall, the top line and bottom line suffer.

When it comes to IT, you can’t do anything with an asset you can’t see. When it comes to your networking, monitoring offers the eyeballs to know what is going on. But IT and network pros don’t spend all day staring at a dashboard waiting for something to happen. Like your local police department, they rely on notifications of trouble. Instead of 911 calls, IT depends on network alerts.

If you’re involved in IT, you’ve likely come across the word “Kubernetes.” It’s a Greek word that means “boat.” It’s one of the most exciting developments in cloud-native hosting in years. Kubernetes has unlocked a new universe of reliability, scalability, and observability, changing how organizations behave and redefining what’s possible. But what exactly is it?

Over the years, I found that building out monitoring scripts and using them properly has proven to be a challenge. When I look back at my internal IT days using platforms like Whatsupgold, PRTG, or N-central, the question always remained the same: how can I monitor efficiently and get alerts that matter? In this blog post, I thought I’d tackle something that is a challenge for a lot of people: monitoring Hypervisors.