Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

When Java web applications experience slowdowns or crashes, the culprit is often the Tomcat server. For DevOps engineers overseeing critical applications, proactive monitoring is crucial for ensuring optimal performance and reliability. In this guide, we'll explore the essential aspects of monitoring Apache Tomcat servers, focusing on the key metrics to track, setting up robust monitoring systems, and troubleshooting common performance issues that could impact your application’s stability.

Understanding what’s happening inside your applications is key to keeping them performing well and reliably. OpenTelemetry tracing is an open-source, flexible solution that lets you monitor your distributed systems without locking you into a specific vendor. reliably This guide walks you through everything you need to know about OpenTelemetry tracing, from the basics to more advanced techniques, with practical tips for troubleshooting common issues along the way.

When your microservices architecture starts growing, tracking requests as they bounce between services becomes a real headache. You know the feeling—a user reports a slow checkout process, and you're left wondering which of your twenty services is the bottleneck. That's where distributed tracing with Prometheus comes in.

In today's connected world, APIs are the backbone of modern applications. Whether you're working on a microservices architecture, a mobile app, or a SaaS platform, APIs are what keep everything talking to each other. But how do you know if your APIs are healthy, performing well, and delivering what your users need? That's where API monitoring comes in. Let's break down what API monitoring is, why it matters, and how you can build effective API metrics dashboards to keep your systems running smoothly.

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.

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 logs like confetti—and making sense of all that noise is half the battle. OpenTelemetry logging offers a way to bring some order to the chaos. It helps DevOps teams collect logs in a consistent format, no matter what language or framework they’re working with. In this guide, we’ll walk through what OpenTelemetry logging is, why it matters, and how to put it to work in your stack.

Modern applications rely on numerous interconnected endpoints to function properly. Maintaining visibility into these critical connection points is fundamental to both system reliability and security. When endpoints fail, degrade, or become compromised, the impact cascades to users, teams, and ultimately affects your bottom line. Effective endpoint monitoring provides the visibility needed to prevent these issues.

In modern software architecture, applications aren't just getting bigger—they're getting more distributed. With microservices, serverless functions, and containers running across multiple environments, understanding what's happening inside your systems can feel like trying to track a single raindrop in a storm. That's where traces and spans come in. These observability tools aren't just buzzwords—they're your secret weapon for making sense of complex distributed systems.

When major tech companies maintain high availability while others struggle with frequent outages, the difference often comes down to one thing: effective metrics monitoring. This guide will walk you through everything you need to know about metrics monitoring, from fundamental concepts to advanced strategies.