Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Prometheus Monitoring: Instant Queries and Range Queries Explained This discussion is part of the basic monitoring series, an effort to clarify monitoring concepts for both beginners and experienced users.

You’re staring at logs, trying to figure out what caused that odd error in the middle of the night. Or maybe you're following a chain of requests across services, hoping to understand how one user action triggered a series of unexpected behaviors. That’s where distributed tracing and request tracking—specifically, correlation IDs and trace IDs—are invaluable. It’s the kind of detail that can make debugging faster and less painful.

Modern systems throw off a lot of data—metrics, traces, logs—sometimes more than we know what to do with. When you're trying to understand how values spread out over time (like response times, memory usage, or queue lengths), averages alone don’t tell the full story. OpenTelemetry histograms help fill in those gaps. This guide walks through what they are, why they matter, and how DevOps engineers can use them to improve observability in real systems.

We’ve rolled out a small update to the StatusGator iframe embed feature! Now, when you embed your status page on your website or app, it can include a link to your full StatusGator status page — giving your users a simple way to view detailed information about outages. And there’s more: If you’ve uploaded a favicon in your Status page settings, it will now appear next to the link in the iframe.

At least once a week, a team reaches out to discuss migrating from an established SIEM or analysis platform. This major decision is influenced by several compelling factors, which can create significant work for engineering teams and pose risks to the business. The cost of switching to a new platform, often referred to as displacement costs, can be substantial.

The information age has leapt forward with the explosive rise of generative AI. Capabilities like natural language processing, image generation, and code automation are now mainstream — driving the business goals of winning customers, enhancing productivity, and reducing costs across every sector. New large language models are emerging almost daily, existing language models are optimized in a frantic race to the top. There seems no stopping the AI boom.

Despite the nonstop warnings, millions of users still gamble with their data. A 2023 survey by Acronis revealed that 41% of people rarely or never back up their digital files, and businesses aren’t much better. Fewer than 20% of businesses back up their SaaS data, even though tools like Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 don’t guarantee full recovery after a loss or attack. The consequences?

Elastic Cloud Serverless provides the fastest way to start and scale security, observability, and search solutions — without managing infrastructure. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Elastic Cloud Serverless on Google Cloud — now available in the Iowa (us-central1) region. Elastic Cloud Serverless provides the fastest way to start and scale observability, security, and search solutions without managing infrastructure.