Grafana is a powerful open-source platform for monitoring and observability, but what truly makes it shine are its plugins. For technology engineers looking to expand Grafana's capabilities, plugins are the way to go. In this post, we'll dive into the world of Grafana plugins and offer some unique tips to get the most out of them.

OpenSearch is a powerful, open-source analytics and search engine that can be utilized to construct custom search solutions for a broad variety of applications, from websites to enterprise-level systems. It enables flexible search and indexing abilities, making it suitable for a range of uses, a great example of this is scalability. OpenSearch is designed for horizontal scalability, enabling organizations to input additional nodes to their cluster as data volumes and query loads increase.

In today's ever-changing digital development landscape organizations face the challenge of delivering high-quality software quickly and efficiently. Developing and producing new products and updates is a compelling but fundamental part of any technology business. But ensuring the process runs smoothly to make certain that your release reaches your customers as expected can be challenging. This is where release management tools come in.

As organisations strive to deliver seamless user experiences, maximise operational efficiency, and maintain a competitive edge, the need for comprehensive Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools becomes increasingly evident. APM tools offer invaluable insights into the performance and behaviour of applications in real-time. They go further than the conventional monitoring approach by providing a holistic view of the entire stack, encompassing servers, databases and user interactions.

Application performance monitoring (APM) tools have become a fundamental part of many organisations that wish to track and observe the optimal functioning of their web-based applications. These tools serve to greatly simplify the process through automation and allow teams to effectively collaborate to maximize efficiency, enabling you to reach the root cause of an issue before it reaches your customers.

The majority of users continually depend on a variety of web applications to meet their everyday needs, so a business’s success is now often proportionate to the success of its application performance. As a result, the importance of using an appropriate APM solution has become even greater to businesses globally. Application Performance Monitoring (APM) still continues to grow in popularity and is now considered a must for observing the health and performance of your organization's applications.

Whatever the size of your network, as an engineer you will often notice a significant amount of log data being generated. This data will require centralizing for further analysis and management, which can be particularly challenging if you have varying log formats, such as plain text or HTML.

Monitoring the key metrics of your application’s performance are essential to keep your software applications running smoothly as one of the key elements underpinning application performance monitoring. In this article, we will cover many of the key metrics that you should strongly consider monitoring to ensure that your next software engineering project remains fully performant.

When focusing on application performance monitoring (APM), there are currently many options to select from. With many of the tools available offering similar features, it can often be challenging to make an informed decision. One tool that appears to be on almost every list of ‘the best APM tools’ is Datadog.

In the context of application performance monitoring (APM) and observability, traces and spans are fundamental concepts that help users to track and understand the flow of requests and operations within a system. They are essential in assisting users to identify bottlenecks, troubleshoot issues, and optimize application performance.