Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

October 2023

Common Nagios Errors and What to Do about Them

Nagios is an open-source monitoring system that has become indispensable for system administrators and DevOps teams across the world. However, like any other software, you’re bound to come across errors with Nagios. In this article, we’re going to take a look at some common errors and how to solve them, along with the pros and cons of Nagios, and why MetricFire is the perfect alternative for monitoring.

Monitoring CPU Temperature with Hosted Graphite

Monitoring CPU temperature is crucial for ensuring the smooth and efficient functioning of computer systems. As processors become more powerful, they generate more heat, which can lead to performance issues, system instability, and even hardware damage. Overheating is a common problem faced by many computer users, especially those who engage in resource-intensive tasks like gaming or running complex software.

Grafana and Graphite Best Practices

Efficient monitoring and visualization of performance metrics are paramount for ensuring seamless user experiences and reliable system operations. Grafana and Graphite, two powerful open-source tools, form an unbeatable combination when it comes to monitoring and analyzing time-series data. Grafana provides a robust and flexible platform for visualizing data, while Graphite acts as a scalable and efficient backend for storing and retrieving metric data.

Kafka Monitoring Using Prometheus

In this article, we are going to discuss how to set up Kafka monitoring using Prometheus. Kafka is one of the most widely used streaming platforms, and Prometheus is a popular way to monitor Kafka. We will use Prometheus to pull metrics from Kafka and then visualize the important metrics on a Grafana dashboard. We will also look at some of the challenges of running a self-hosted Prometheus and Grafana instance versus the Hosted Grafana offered by MetricFire.

Complete Guide To Grafana Dashboards

Grafana is one of the most popular dashboarding and visualization tools for metrics. The Grafana Dashboards are a very important part of infrastructure and application instrumentation. In this post, we will deep dive into Grafana dashboards. We will create a Grafana dashboard for a VM’s most important metrics, learn to create advanced dashboards with filters for multiple instance metrics, import and export dashboards, learn to refresh intervals in dashboards and learn about plugins.

Grafana vs. Zabbix

Grafana is a visualization tool that allows you to see and analyze all of your metrics in one unified dashboard. Grafana can pull metrics from any source, display that data, and then enable you to annotate and understand the data directly in the dashboard. Grafana dashboards are designed to allow you to visualize information in a ton of ways, from histograms and heatmaps to world maps. Grafana also has an alerting feature that can communicate with you through Slack, PagerDuty, and more.

Use Grafana to Monitor Flask Apps With Graphite

Monitoring the performance and health of web applications is paramount for ensuring a seamless user experience. Flask offers developers the flexibility to build dynamic applications. However, as applications grow in complexity, so does the need for efficient monitoring solutions. This is where Grafana and Graphite come into play.

Tutorial: Monitoring MySQL Server Performance with Prometheus and sql_exporter

Databases in one form or another are almost an inseparable part of modern applications. A popular one among them is MySQL on which this article will focus. But how to monitor MySQL? This article will give an introduction to this topic.

Prometheus Dashboards

Prometheus is a very popular open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit originally built in 2012. Its main focus is to provide valid insight into system performance by providing a way for certain variables of that system to be monitored. Prometheus displays the performance of these variables as a graph to allow its users to see their system’s performance at a glance.

Our Favorite Grafana Dashboards

Grafana is an open-source visualization and analytics tool that lets you query, graph, and alert on your time series metrics no matter where they are stored - Grafana dashboards provide telling insight into your organization. All data from Grafana Dashboards can be queried and presented with different types of panels ranging from time-series graphs and single stats displays to histograms, heat maps, and many more.

Monitoring your infrastructure with StatsD and Graphite

Collecting metrics about your servers, applications, and traffic is a critical part of an application development project. There are many things that can go wrong in production systems, and collecting and organizing data can help you pinpoint bottlenecks and problems in your infrastructure. In this article, we will discuss Graphite and StatsD, and how they can help form the basis of monitoring infrastructure.

Configuring Python StatsD Client

Building and deploying highly scalable, distributed applications in the ever-changing landscape of software development is only half the journey. The other half is monitoring your application states and instances while recording accurate metrics. There are moments when you wish to check how many resources are being consumed, how many files are under access by the specialized process, etc. These metrics provide valuable insights into our tech stack execution and management.

Observability-OSS vs Paid vs Managed OSS with Hosted Graphite

Observability is a critical aspect of modern software development and infrastructure management. It involves the ability to gain insights into the internal workings of your systems, applications, and services through monitoring and collecting relevant data. With the increasing complexity of technology stacks and the need for real-time visibility, observability has become a fundamental requirement for businesses across various industries.

The Best Cloud Infrastructure Automation Tools

The past decade has seen a drastic growth in the adoption of public cloud. One of the primary reasons for this is its cheaper infrastructure and ease of scale. With such rapid adoption of public cloud, the need for infrastructure automation also arises. This is because teams want to quickly provision infrastructure and automate tasks that previously took weeks in the case of traditional data centers, down to minutes in the public cloud.

What are Prometheus Functions?

Prometheus is a platform for real-time systems and event monitoring and alerting. The Prometheus project is free, open-source, and available on GitHub. Originally developed at SoundCloud, Prometheus became a project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in 2016, alongside other popular frameworks such as Kubernetes. The core of the project is the Prometheus server, which acts as the system’s “brain” by collecting various metrics and storing them in a time-series database.