Like all good IT organizations, you religiously measure the performance and availability of your services and applications. But if those apps run in the cloud, critical components are often delivered by a third party or the cloud provider. In the case of a service disruption or degraded performance, how do you know what the problem is—your code, the network, or the provider? And, if the problem is with the service provider, how do you convince them to take action as quickly as possible?

With the increasing adoption of containerization, the need arose to manage, schedule and control clusters of containers, and that’s where Kubernetes comes in. Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications, generally being Docker containers. When interfacing with Kubernetes, 2 competing tools are often discussed: Terraform, and Helm.

This week’s big news is that Grafana v5.2.2 was released and includes fixes for Prometheus graphs, dashboard links, loading external plugins, SQL connection leaks, and more. Also, check out our new Grafana Flux plugin and monitor temperature and forecasts using Grafana and the openweathermap API.

Enterprises are increasingly moving their applications to the cloud and Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the leading cloud provider. Our 20 extensions provide expanded AWS monitoring.

For all the people in a hurry, StackStorm will be at ServerlessConf in San Francisco July 31-Aug 1, 2018. Winson Chan and Dmitri Zimine will be speakers from StackStorm talking about our new workflow engine and serverless functions. We also have a booth with cool demos showcasing our new multi-cloud serverless orchestrator – Orquesta and our new workflow engine. Of course, we will have some cool swags!

Thomas Stocking, co-founder and vice president of product strategy, recently wrote an article titled How to Efficiently Discover Network Resources, featured in The Data Center Journal. The article talks about network discovery tools and processes, and why it’s important to automate and standardize. Many business processes (security management, service delivery and service support) depend on the administrator’s knowledge of the network details.

When you visit a webpage that is down, most of the time you'll see an error: you'd see a 404 error if the page can't be found or a 503 if the server isn't unavailable. Although this is not what you want to see, it is helpful. You know that the site is down and have a rough idea why. But sometimes you don't see an error... just a spinning wheel.

Flux, the long-awaited new functional query processing engine for InfluxDB, has finally landed. If you’re curious to learn more about the hows and whys of its design, check out this GrafanaCon EU session with InfluxData Cofounder and CTO Paul Dix. Also we’d like to share a recent presentation from David Kaltschmidt, Director, UX for Grafana Labs on the new Flux support in Grafana!

Windows hosts make up a significant portion of the infrastructure of many organizations, and visibility into Windows systems can be a vital observability need. We’re pleased to announce that Datadog’s Live Process monitoring is now available for Windows.

When we announced Stride in September 2017, we said, “It’s time we rethink the way we’re working. We believe that teams can stay connected and keep moving forward.” We still believe that. We knew we were taking a risk by entering an already competitive real-time team communications market, but we were willing to do the hard work necessary to build a great product. And we believe we were on that path.