Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

November 2022

SQL Server Monitoring: What metrics to track

SQL Server Monitoring has become an essential part of modern-day applications since a major chunk of these applications rely heavily on a database. It is therefore important to monitor your metrics and make the best out of your database services. SQL Server Monitoring offers plenty of metrics to choose from. We will be breaking down the five key categories that an SQL server provides for a comprehensive view of their functionality.

Top 8 Web Application Performance Metrics

Web application performance metrics help determine certain aspects that impact the performance of an application. This article discusses eight key metrics, including: Web performance is rapidly evolving, with new trends like Google’s Core Web Vitals (CWV), increasing use of images and video on web pages, and the rollout of 5G. We’ll present three methods that can help you adapt to these changes and boost the performance of your web applications.

Using ClickHouse with MetricFire

In the analytics domain, fast and reliable storage is an important aspect for businesses to handle a large amount of data. There are different types of data storage including RDBMS, NoSQL, data lake, data warehouse, and graph database. Among these, the most widely used is RDBMS that powers various systems and applications of companies of all sizes. RDBMS is easy to use and straightforward to understand thanks to its table-based (or column-based) data format.

A Modern Guide to MySQL Performance Monitoring

According to results from the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2022, nearly half (46%) of respondents say they use MySQL, making it the most widely-adopted database technology among developers today. This popularity is due in no small part to MySQL’s unique features that help it handily meet the needs of modern applications, from small software projects to business-critical systems.

Making the Most of CloudWatch Log Insights: 7 Best Practices

Amazon CloudWatch provides Log Insights, a feature that can help you: CloudWatch Log Insights uses a proprietary query language with several basic commands. It provides sample queries for common AWS service log types, as well as query auto-completion. Learn more about CloudWatch Log Insights capabilities and how to use them.

Grafana Worldmap Panel

Grafana Worldmap is a free-of-cost panel used to display time-series metrics over a world map. Users can choose to visualize their data based on cities, states, countries, or any other segregation they like as long as they have a coordinate for each data point. Each data point comes in the form of circles that vary in size depending on the value of data and can get color-coded as per thresholds.

Redis: Open Source vs. Enterprise

Are you curious about the difference between open-source Redis and Redis enterprise? Of course, Redis Enterprise is a hosted service that runs Redis db on behalf of its customers, while open-source Redis is available for anyone to use. However, there's also a key difference between open source and enterprise in how the clusters are implemented. In order to understand the difference, we need to know what Redis Clusters are. ‍

Grafana vs. Chronograf and InfluxDB

How can you judge Grafana vs. Chronograf and InfluxDB? Monitoring various systems is a crucial component of continuous maintenance. You can look at different parameters of the monitored system and take corresponding actions for certain conditions. For example, engineers can prevent server failure when they see the load on the server approaching its critical point. If the numbers of processed transactions (or registered users) exceed the expected level, you can celebrate your success.

Kafka performance monitoring metrics

In this article, we will analyze what are the metrics for monitoring Kafka performance and why it is important to constantly monitor them. We will also look at the process of monitoring metrics for Kafka using Hosted Graphite by MetricFire. To learn more about MetricFire, book a demo with the MetricFire team or sign up for the free trial.

Installing the HG Heroku Monitoring & Dashboards Add-on

HG or HostedGraphite provides a complete infrastructure and application monitoring platform from a suite of open-source monitoring tools. Depending on the setup, you can choose Hosted Graphite as your data source and view all required metrics on beautiful Grafana dashboards in real time. Hosted Graphite offers a wide range of tools, add-ons, and plugins that make it possible to measure, analyze, and visualize large amounts of data about your applications with ease.

Grafana vs. Splunk

Are you trying to choose between Grafana and Splunk, but can't find enough information about their capabilities? In this blog, we highlight the details of why a user should select Grafana OR Splunk as part of their monitoring stack and what are the user benefits of each. Also, you can check out what it's like to make your own Grafana dashboard using our MetricFire free trial. Get onto the product in minutes and see if you prefer Grafana over Splunk.

ELK Review: ELK vs. MetricFire

PU, memory use, latency, network bandwidth. These are just some of the monitoring metrics businesses analyze for security and performance. But successful data-driven organizations delve deeper than this. These companies probe millions of real-time metrics for unexpected insights and predict outcomes weeks, months, and years into the future. ELK helps them do this. It's a data analytics platform from open-source developer Elastic.

Tableau Review: Tableau vs MetricFire

Every day, businesses monitor system resources for performance, security, performance, and workflows. Otherwise, they jeopardize day-to-day operations when issues go unnoticed. Tableau presents itself as a data-driven monitoring tool that enhances data analysis of physical and virtual server environments. But just how good is it?

SolarWinds Review: SolarWinds vs. MetricFire

SolarWinds is a network and application monitoring solution, but primarily a network monitoring solution. Founded in 1999, the company has built an online community of 150,000 registered users. However, monitoring has come a long way since the early 2000s. How does SolarWinds stack up against MetricFire in terms of features and pricing? In this article, we break down the comparison into easily digestible, unbiased information to help you make an informed decision.

Grafana vs. Tableau

When it comes to visualization tools, there are various options, all designed for different kinds of data. Some of the most recognized among them include Grafana and Tableau. If you’re not sure which one to use, this article should give you a better idea of what kind of purpose each one has and which one will suit your needs best. One great way to find out what tool works best for you is to try it out! Try out Grafana in seconds on MetricFire's Hosted Grafana free trial.

Grafana alerting

A lot of organizations are using Grafana to visualize information and get notified about events happening within their infrastructure or data. In this article, we will show how to create and configure Grafana Alert rules. To get started, log in to the MetricFire free trial, where you can send metrics and make Grafana dashboards right on our platform.

Cluster Monitoring with Prometheus and Rancher

In this article, we present an overview of cluster monitoring using Rancher and Prometheus as well as provide some brief setup tutorials for both tools. We further introduce a metric visualization tool called Grafana that transforms your Prometheus time-series data into graphs and visualizations. MetricFire specializes in monitoring systems. You can use this product with minimal configuration to gain in-depth insight into your environment.

How to Monitor Redis Performance

In this article, we are going to look at how to monitor Redis performance using Prometheus. This will allow Redis Administrators to centrally manage all of their Redis clusters without setting up any additional infrastructure for monitoring. To follow the steps in this blog, sign up for the MetricFire free trial, where you can use Graphite and Grafana directly on our platform.

Develop and Deploy a Python API with Kubernetes and Docker

Docker is one of the most popular containerization technologies. It is a simple-to-use, developer-friendly tool, and has advantages over other similar technologies that make using it smooth and easy. Since its first open-source release in March 2013, Docker has gained attention from developers and ops engineers. According to Docker Inc., Docker users have downloaded over 105 billion containers and 'dockerized' 5.8 million containers on Docker Hub. The project has over 32K stars on Github.

Develop and Deploy a Python API with Kubernetes and Docker - part II

In part I of this tutorial, we developed a Python API then we used Docker and Docker Compose to containerize the application and create a development environment. In part II, we are going to discover some other details about Docker and Docker Compose as well as how to deploy the same app to a GKE cluster.

Prometheus vs. Zabbix

For a successful business, you need to introduce an effective monitoring system covering all areas of your business and infrastructure - servers, databases, services, overall traffic, and even revenue collected. The users of this monitoring system can be system administrators, software engineers, information engineers, as well as all sorts of analysts.

Top 8 Open Source Dashboards

Before exploring open-source dashboard tools, we first need to learn about Dashboards and how they can be useful. A dashboard is a data visualization and management tool that visually tracks and analyzes the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), business analytics metrics, infrastructure health and status, and data points for an organization, team, or process. It can be used to present operational and analytical business data with interactive data visualizations to your team.

Pandora's Flask: Monitoring a Python web app with Prometheus

We eat lots of our own dog food at MetricFire, monitoring our services with a dedicated cluster running the same software. This has worked out really well for us over the years: as our own customer, we quickly spot issues in our various ingestion, storage, and rendering services. It also drives the service status transparency our customers love. Our customers include large multinational coffee brewers, game companies, and other data science/SaaS companies.

Integrating Heroku Metrics with Amazon CloudWatch Metrics

Application monitoring plays a critical role in the success of your digital products. As you monitor various performance metrics such as usage of CPU, memory, network traffic, and more, you can swiftly take pre-emptive actions before things develop into a larger problem. In spite of the importance of monitoring, the task can become challenging when your infrastructure exists across multiple cloud platforms including AWS and Heroku.

How to monitor Nginx

Are you interested in learning how to monitor Nginx? In this post, we'll show you all about how Nginx works and how you can use Hosted Graphite to monitor it. First, we'll read what Nginx monitoring is all about and how it can together work with Prometheus. Nginx, pronounced like “engine-ex”, is an open-source web server that, since its initial success as a web server, is now also used as a reverse proxy, HTTP cache, and load balancer.

10 Best Open Source Switch Port Monitoring Tools

Switch port monitoring is one of the most crucial facets of network management. It not only provides insights into network switch port status but CPU load, memory utilization, historical port utilization, and more. Investing in switch port monitoring improves network-related performance across your organization and optimizes port usage. As a result, you'll enhance security, reduce cybercrime, optimize networks, enhance compliance, and safeguard your entire IT infrastructure.

9 Best Open Source Network Monitoring Tools

Network monitoring is a critical component of your network management strategy that provides valuable insights into network-related problems which can affect your organization. When you monitor networks regularly, you'll mitigate risks like overloaded networks, router problems, downtime, cybercrime, and data loss. Network monitoring lets you: All successful companies invest in network monitoring tools that provide accurate insights into performance, speed, security, and productivity.