Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

If you’re already running or are familiar with Home Assistant, you’ve likely worked with integrations, maybe a few automations, and possibly MQTT as a way to wire devices together. But webhooks add another layer of flexibility that lets you level up your smart home into a fully-customized, intelligent network. Instead of relying on built-in integrations and being confined to the same local network, you can let external devices and services push events directly into Home Assistant.

The employee digital experience (DEX) is no longer just a concept; it has become a concrete discipline supported by specialized tools. At the center of this transformation is Collective IQ, Almaden’s DEX solution, available in the Essential and Business editions. The Business edition includes AlmaAI a family of generative AI capabilities that take IT management to a new level.

When your database performance degrades, diagnosing the root cause is rarely quick or straightforward. Your existing tools might surface metrics like CPU utilization, wait events, and query duration, but then leave you to correlate the data and identify what went wrong. Worse, what first appears to be the root cause can often just be a downstream effect of multiple interrelated issues.

Today, roughly 94% of enterprises are projected to use some form of cloud service, with 82% adopting hybrid models that combine cloud and on-premises infrastructure. By 2030, around 60% of all corporate data is expected to be stored in the cloud, highlighting a major shift away from traditional storage systems toward distributed, on-demand infrastructure. With such a huge amount of data, companies need a scalable, affordable, and secure method to store 1 PB.

Key takeaway: Granting AI agents unrestricted access to cloud infrastructure is an unacceptable security risk. Upsun provides a "zero-trust" framework by utilizing isolated, production-perfect preview environments that allow AI to be productive without the risk of a hallucinated production outage.

Drop a JAR on the JVM. Get distributed tracing, RxJava context propagation, log-trace correlation, and Vert.x internal metrics. No code changes. No Maven dependency. Java 8–21. Inside the design of last9/vertx-opentelemetry v2.3.4. Prathamesh works as an evangelist at Last9, runs SRE stories - where SRE and DevOps folks share their stories, and maintains o11y.wiki - a glossary of all terms related to observability.