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The latest News and Information on Monitoring for Websites, Applications, APIs, Infrastructure, and other technologies.

Deploying Prometheus With Docker

There are different ways you can use to deploy the Prometheus monitoring tool in your environment. One of the fastest ways to get started is to deploy it as a Docker container. This guide shows you how to quickly set up a minimal Prometheus on your laptop. You can then extend that setup to add a monitoring dashboard, alerting, and authentication.

Are ChatGPT or Claude better than Playwright Codegen?

I'm a bit of an AI skeptic. And even though GitHub Copilot is my daily auto-completion on steroids, I always double-check the code generated by LLMs. If you're using AI for coding, you probably know that the results are sometimes surprisingly good and other times shockingly terrible. Lately, I have seen more and more articles and even docs recommending ChatGPT to generate Playwright tests. Could this be true? Are ChatGPT and friends really that good at generating test code?

How DX NetOps Fuels Rapid, Accurate Isolation in Modern Networks

Businesses, like pretty much all of us, continue to grow ever more reliant upon network connectivity. When that connectivity falters, it can be extremely disruptive—and very costly. According to a report in PCMag, an internet shutdown of one minute can cost a business like Amazon almost $978,000 in revenue losses. For Alphabet, the number is $538,000.

Mastering Tail Sampling for OpenTelemetry: Cost-Effective Strategies with Cribl

Recently, I have seen a trend of enterprises moving toward OpenTelemetry (OTel) for application tracing. Tail sampling, in particular, has emerged as a preferred approach to gain actionable insights while balancing data volume and cost. OpenTelemetry offers developers and practitioners the ability to instrument their code with open-source tools, moving away from vendor-provided tools for application instrumentation.

Leveling up your observability practice - Part 1

Lessons from the front lines: Moving to observability maturity What separates the observability experts from the novices? It's a question that's been on my mind lately, especially after diving into our recent 2024 State of Observability Survey of over 500 practitioners. In my past roles as a DevOps engineer and a site reliability engineer (SRE), I've seen firsthand how a mature observability practice can be the difference between sleepless nights and smooth sailing.

Collecting Windows telemetry with Elastic: An introduction to the ETW Filebeat input

In the world of security, being able to use system telemetry of Windows hosts opens new possibilities for monitoring, troubleshooting, and securing IT environments. Recognizing this, Elastic has introduced new capabilities focused on Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) — a powerful Windows-native mechanism for capturing a vast array of system and application events. With these new additions, Elastic users can capture, analyze, and visualize Windows telemetry using the Elastic Search AI Platform.

Configuring Kafka Brokers for High Resilience and Availability

In a Kafka setup, high availability isn’t just nice to have—it’s a lifeline. Downtime, data loss, or hiccups in message flow can make or break critical applications. Let’s be real: setting up Kafka brokers to be resilient takes some fine-tuning, but it’s absolutely worth it. Imagine dealing with failovers smoothly or knowing your data is protected even if a broker goes down—this is what configuring for resilience is all about.