Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Hundreds of organizations have migrated from legacy incident response tools to Grafana IRM in recent years as they look to improve production reliability, reduce costs, and consolidate their tooling. Grafana IRM, our incident response and management product, has helped organizations such as LATAM Airlines simplify stressful incidents with observability-native workflows, but every organization has its reservations about the actual migration process.

Imagine sitting in an airport’s international terminal. All around you, people are talking to friends and family, many using different languages. The din of noise becomes a constant thrum, and you can’t make sense of anything – not even conversations in your native language. Log data is similar to this scenario. Every technology in your environment generates log data, and information about the activities happening from logins to processing.

In today’s modern era of fast-changing business and operational conditions, organizations need IT management resources that are resilient and can adapt to constant change. This objective is often summed up in one word: assurance. But the exact methodologies and IT investments to get there can vary. Regardless of how it’s approached, IT platform assurance is critical to navigating and managing the dynamic environments of modern enterprises operating at scale.

Four years ago, I wrote the blog post The NuGet packages we use to build elmah.io. Since then, we have made several changes to our tech stack as well as upgraded to recent versions of.NET. For this post, I'll update you on the packages we use as of writing this post. I hope you will find some inspiration in seeing how a system like elmah.io is built.

Structured logging has emerged as a crucial aspect of modern application development and monitoring. Unlike traditional logging, structured logging organizes log data into a defined format, often in JSON or XML, making it easier to parse, search, and analyse. This practice simplifies troubleshooting, enhances observability, and supports seamless integration with monitoring tools.

Back in Alerts Are Fundamentally Messy, I made the point that the events we monitor are often fuzzy and uncertain. To make a distinction between what is valid or invalid as an event, context is needed, and since context doesn’t tend to exist within a metric, humans go around and validate alerts to add it. As such, humans are part of the alerting loop, and alerts can be framed as devices used to redirect our attention. In this post, I want to drive this concept a bit further.

FinOps for engineers is gaining more and more ground in the cloud computing sphere. As organizations move toward cloud models, managing the costs associated with them becomes an increasingly important factor, if not the most important. FinOps focuses on optimizing the use of cloud resources. Therefore, FinOps for engineers means that they not only design necessary solutions but also warn about the economic impact.

We’ve added two new ways to work with your data in AppSignal: Dataset Exporting and Graph Data Exporting. These features make it easier to analyze and share insights, whether you’re debugging, reporting, or collaborating with your team.

In the realm of modern software development practices, observability is no longer an optional add-on. It is a mission-critical capability. Like how control theory revolutionized industrial systems, and quality assurance redefined manufacturing processes, observability transforms the software systems and their development processes in many ways inspired by the brick-and-mortar industries. This post explores the best practices in modern observability to help you leverage its full potential.