Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Silent failures — like missed cron jobs, database crashes, or backup issues — can cause real damage if they go unnoticed. Traditional monitoring often focuses on requests and server metrics but misses crucial background processes. This creates a significant monitoring blind spot where critical elements of your application can fail without immediate detection. To help eliminate this blind spot, we've introduced AppSignal Wrap.

In any industry, network downtime and performance issues can have a significant cost. But when it comes to financial services, the impact is even more profound, particularly for revenue-generating applications. Financial service firms and their customers rely constantly on these applications. When these applications experience slowdowns or outages, the impact can extend beyond revenue loss and lead to customer dissatisfaction, reduced employee productivity, and potential reputational damage.

When network issues arise, it doesn’t take long for fingers to start pointing—often in the direction of network operations teams. In such moments, being forced to rely on guesswork or speculative theories is the last thing any team wants. Making matters worse, even if answers are found, but it takes too long to arrive at them, the reputational damage, not to mention the negative repercussions of the actual outage, are already done.

Note: The original version of this blog post published on ;login: on February 24, 2025. When architecting the flow of observability data such as logs, metrics, traces or profiles, you’ve likely noticed that most solutions ask you to deploy an agent or collector. Understandably, you might be hesitant to deploy yet another application just so you can get your data into your storage system of choice.

In just a few short years, OpenTelemetry has become the second largest CNCF project behind Kubernetes and is well on its way to becoming an industry standard for collecting and exporting telemetry data. And with KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 just around the corner, there’s no one better to talk to about the state of OpenTelemetry than Ted Young. Ted is the co-founder of OpenTelemetry and serves on the OpenTelemetry Governance Committee.

So you've got Prometheus up and running, but now you're scratching your head looking at those queries. PromQL (Prometheus Query Language) looks simple on the surface, but it packs some serious power once you know how to wield it. Whether you're debugging production issues at 2 AM or building dashboards that actually tell you something useful, these PromQL tricks will upgrade your monitoring game.

Monitoring is the backbone of any reliable DevOps setup. And if you’re working with monitoring, you’ve likely used Prometheus. This open-source powerhouse has redefined how we track system performance, but are you making the most of its API? Prometheus is the go-to solution for monitoring container-based environments, particularly in Kubernetes. Its pull-based model and flexible query language provide deep visibility into your systems.

Today we're introducing bulk editing for monitors, making it easier than ever to update multiple monitors simultaneously. This powerful new feature helps you efficiently manage your monitoring setup at scale.

In today's always-on world, your website or application is the lifeblood of your business. Downtime isn't just an inconvenience; it's a threat to your reputation, customer loyalty, and bottom line. As we highlighted in our recent article on MTTR, quickly resolving incidents is crucial. But equally important is how you communicate those incidents to your users. That's where status page templates come in.