Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

When your Linux system feels sluggish, one of the first things to investigate is the CPU usage. The CPU (Central Processing Unit) is the brain of your machine, and if it’s overloaded, everything else slows down. In this guide, you’ll learn different ways to Linux check CPU usage with command-line tools, how to interpret the metrics, and why automatic monitoring with Icinga ensures long-term system stability.

An incident’s in progress. Services are slow, customers are frustrated, and your dashboards… look fine. At least, until you search for payment metrics and get 47 different names for the same signal. Suddenly, the real issue isn’t latency — it’s inconsistency. The OpenTelemetry project recently published a three-part series on naming conventions to solve exactly this problem.

Do you create reports yourself or rely on others to provide them? Regardless of your role at the IT support desk, reports play a crucial role. They help teams monitor performance, identify trends, and improve service quality. Let’s take a look at the reports you’ll need in 2025.

The BigQuery Sink connector is a critical piece of Kafka infrastructure that allows you to offload your Kafka topic data into BigQuery in real time. It is the third most-used connector among Kafka users (after the Google Cloud Managed Service for Apache Kafka and the original WePay sink connector), but it's not without its fair share of plot twists. Here's the story of how this connector switched hands three times and we ultimately ended up helping to re-build it.

As the Senior Manager of Finance & Accounting here at CloudZero, and with a career in FP&A that includes tenures at large public companies, I’ve spent a significant amount of time observing the interactions between the folks who plan the company’s budget and those who spend it. While engineering and operations teams focus on the execution side, my team ensures that the company has the resources required to make each endeavor a success.

For years, you had an unspoken agreement. Your networks were built to be resilient, and your applications were, for the most part, forgiving. You sent emails, transferred files, and backed up data. If a few packets went missing along the way, the protocols would quietly clean up the mess. A little bit of packet loss was just background noise, an expected imperfection in a system that was, by and large, incredibly robust. You could tolerate it.