Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

This week we share articles covering Grafana’s alpha Explore UI, the many ways Logicify uses Grafana, building your own centralized monitoring stack, and more.

When there’s an incident, Grafana is often the starting point for figuring out a response. Users look at a time series panel and form a hypothesis. And in many situations, they’d like to dive deeper. To help make that easier, Grafana Labs has created the Explore UI, which allows you to iterate quickly through Prometheus queries, while leaving your dashboards intact.

One more article in Logicify Monitoring Tools series talks about Grafana, a software we use both for internal and external projects to visualize and analyze the data. The article could be of interest to CTOs, developers and DevOps, system administrators and Project Managers, and everyone interested.

If you’ve been paying attention, you know that although collecting and reviewing metrics and logs is a core part of running a stable and successful service, access to raw events and the ability to search and pivot on any dimension of your production environment, no matter how high-cardinality, is what will help your team debug and troubleshoot new problems and outages more quickly.

Achieving optimal performance can be challenging when you depend on separate platforms to monitor service health and to manage your logs. When data about your systems is spread across multiple platforms, investigating issues—and ultimately resolving them—takes longer and requires expertise with more tools. It takes more effort to identify real customer impact, as well as to verify that your responses to an incident are having the desired effect.

We’ve seen folks do amazing things using our Honeycomb Beelines–getting their apps instrumented in next-to-no time, expanding their observability, growing their understanding of what is happening in their code in production. Now, prepare to do more with improved tracing support!

Another holiday season will soon be upon us, and many retailers and eCommerce businesses are already making plans. As you take inventory of what you learned last holiday season, let’s start with some lessons learned by the entire retail industry this time last year. In addition to stocking up on hot items and planning your promotions, the most competitive sites found that using AI/ML to optimize customer experience not only kept customers happy, it dramatically increased their revenues.

Franz Kafka was a German-speaking Bohemian Jewish novelist and short story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. Apache Kafka, on the other hand, is an open-source stream-processing software platform. Due to its widespread integration into enterprise-level infrastructures, monitoring Kafka performance at scale has become an increasingly important issue.

This week we’re sharing articles on monitoring mixins, cloud native monitoring, monitoring your microservices, and a unique way to know when your software license is going to expire.

One of the features we love about RapidSpike is the sheer amount of data we collect about the performance of our customers’ websites. We are able to use this data to provide great insight into real user experiences and, crucially, how to improve those experiences. However not everyone has time to analyse that data, or knows exactly what to look for.