Availability and reliability are two essential concepts in system design, but they are not the same. Availability refers to how often a system is up and running, accessible for use. In contrast, reliability measures how consistently the system performs without failure over time. Both are important, but they focus on different aspects of a system's performance.

Effective application monitoring is essential for developers, and Heroku, a popular Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), provides a solid platform for deploying apps. However, monitoring logs is often an overlooked aspect of maintaining applications on Heroku. Heroku logs provide valuable information to help find bottlenecks, fix issues, and improve application performance.

In modern microservice architectures, requests often span multiple services, making it challenging to monitor and debug performance issues. Distributed tracing provides the ability to follow a request’s journey through these services, identifying performance bottlenecks and dependencies. The W3C trace context standard simplifies this process by introducing two critical headers: traceparent and tracestate.

Prometheus is an open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit that helps developers and operators track the performance and health of their systems. One of its key features is the ability to use buckets to measure and analyse distributions of data. Buckets are essential for tracking HTTP request durations, database query times, and memory usage, helping to understand system behaviour.

With systems more interconnected than ever, the ability to communicate quickly and efficiently has become crucial today. This is where gRPC, an open-source framework by Google, comes in to transform the way APIs are designed and utilized. In this blog, we will explore what gRPC is, how it works, how it differs from existing protocols like REST, and the best practices for Optimizing its full potential.

Long-running queries in MySQL can significantly impact the performance and availability of your database. They can consume server resources, lock tables, and block other queries, leading to cascading performance issues. In this blog, we will explore why long-running queries occur, how to detect them, and best practices for managing and optimizing them.

PHP 8.4 introduces several exciting features, improvements, and optimizations. This blog enhances usability, performance, and security, paving the way for more efficient and expressive coding. Let’s dive into the most notable features of PHP 8.4.

Managing log files effectively is crucial for ensuring a well-performing, reliable system. Logrotate, a popular log management tool, provides a flexible way to automatically rotate, compress, and remove old logs. Among its many configurations, two common approaches to trigger log rotation are size-based and time-based rotation. In this blog, we will explore the differences between these methods, compare their use cases, and help you decide which approach (or combination) suits your needs best.

ClickHouse, a columnar database designed for high-performance real-time analytics, is excellent at handling large datasets with speed and efficiency. However, performance issues can occur due to factors like unoptimized queries, resource contention, or improper configuration. As data and query complexity grow, keeping ClickHouse fast can be challenging. This blog will explore common bottlenecks, how to diagnose and resolve them, and include a Python script for automating diagnostics. Lets get started!

Heroku is a popular platform for deploying and scaling applications, and one of its standout features is its centralized logging system. Heroku logs give you visibility into your application’s behaviour, infrastructure events, and platform activities. When paired with a robust monitoring solution like Atatus, you can transform raw log data into actionable insights that keep your applications running smoothly.