Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a suite of cloud computing services for deploying, managing, and monitoring applications. A critical part of deploying reliable applications is securing your infrastructure. Google Cloud Audit Logs record the who, where, and when for activity within your environment, providing a breadcrumb trail that administrators can use to monitor access and detect potential threats across your resources (e.g., storage buckets, databases, service accounts, virtual machines).

Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform for building, deploying, and managing global-scale applications. With a wide range of offerings, including dozens of different services, Azure provides tools for users to create large and sophisticated systems for hosting any type of workload. But with the huge number of configuration options and resource types, understanding the health and performance of your applications in Azure can be challenging.

Datadog dashboards provide immediate visibility and insight into your environments. Setting template variables enables you to filter your dashboard graphs on the fly to visualize specific sets of tagged objects. Now, with saved views, you can save sets of frequently used template variables in order to easily find the data you most care about with just a few clicks.

Logs are an invaluable source of information, as they provide insights into the severity and possible root causes of problems in your system. But it can be hard to get the right level of visibility from your logs while keeping costs to a minimum. Systems that process large volumes of logs consume more resources and therefore make up a higher percentage of your overall monitoring budget. Further, log throughput can be highly variable, creating unexpected resource usage and financial costs.

As more environments run on Kubernetes—including our own— Datadog has been making it easier to get visibility into clusters of any scale. To minimize load on the Kubernetes API server, the Datadog Agent runs in two different modes. The node-based Agent queries local containers or external endpoints for data, while the Cluster Agent fetches cluster-level metadata from the API server.

ProxySQL is a MySQL/MariaDB protocol–compliant load balancer and reverse proxy with native support for a range of popular backends including ClickHouse, Amazon Aurora, and Amazon RDS. ProxySQL efficiently distributes queries to your database servers and caches results, improving resource management and boosting database performance. You can also configure ProxySQL for high availability to reduce downtime.

Sidekiq is a Ruby framework for background job processing. Developers can use Sidekiq to asynchronously run computationally intensive tasks—such as bulk email sending, payment processing, and data importing—to help speed up the response times of their applications. If you’re using Sidekiq Pro or Enterprise, Datadog’s integration helps you monitor the progress of your jobs and the applications that depend on them, all in a single platform.

Many organizations already use Docker to containerize their Windows applications and often run mixed Windows and Linux container environments to support complex architectures. With Kubernetes’s support for deploying clusters with Windows nodes, organizations can leverage the orchestration platform to easily automate container provisioning, networking, scaling, and more for their Windows applications.

Confluent Platform is an event streaming platform built on Apache Kafka. If you’re using Kafka as a data pipeline between microservices, Confluent Platform makes it easy to copy data into and out of Kafka, validate the data, and replicate entire Kafka topics. We’ve partnered with Confluent to create a new Confluent Platform integration.