Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

For a while, tracing in Sentry was... fine. You could open up a slow transaction, poke around, find the N+1, and feel like a hero. But if you wanted to answer more complex questions - like why your payment API was getting slower in Europe, or which CDN was silently tanking your image loads - things got harder. We didn't really build it to help with answering broad questions.

Real estate professionals have said for years that the three most important factors about a property are location, location, and location. Well, for organizations with a web presence — which these days is the vast majority, and 100% of e-commerce companies — the three most important factors about their site are visitor experience, visitor experience, and (let’s all say it together!) visitor experience.

Prometheus is one of the most popular open source monitoring tools due to its powerful flexibility for collecting time series metrics. But raw metrics aren’t always helpful on their own. That’s where Grafana Cloud comes in. By connecting Prometheus to Grafana Cloud, you get rich visualizations, alerts, and dashboards that make your data actionable without having to manage any additional infrastructure.

Why are we still handling IT incident response like it’s 2014? Every day, ITOps teams are flooded with alerts, spread thin across hybrid systems, and stuck trying to stitch together visibility from solutions that don’t talk to each other. The incidents keep coming, but the tools aren’t getting smarter—and the humans are burned out. Even with best practices in place, response is often slow, inconsistent, and reactive. You chase symptoms instead of solving problems.

Everyone in your organization needs logs to perform the critical functions of their job. Developers need them to debug their applications, security engineers need them to respond to incidents, and support engineers need them to help customers troubleshoot issues. These various use cases create general requirements for enriched log data, often including accessing insights from outside typical retention windows.

The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has transformed various sectors, offering enhanced efficiency and connectivity. However, this expansion also introduces significant security challenges. Implementing robust firewall monitoring is essential to protect these devices and the networks they inhabit.

The last few months have been wild. Some of the busiest of my life, actually: For context: I’m Canadian, and all of this happened during the continued threats of annexation. All this to say, it’s been rough. I anticipated this would be a challenging time and that I would be exhausted. So, the plan became: do all the demanding things, take my sabbatical in May, and use April as an ‘in-between’ period with a bit less pressure.