Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Most databases were built for a slower world, one where data waited, systems pulled, and answers came later. But today, data flows. It triggers real-time decisions, powers models in motion, and spans every cloud layer. This shift demands a different kind of database—one built to execute, not just store. Microsoft has answered that call with SQL Server 2025.

Data is the lifeblood of businesses the world over, from the smallest startup to the largest enterprise. Making sure that it’s available when you need it, secured for authorized use, and recoverable from faults is vital to operating data platforms, no matter where your business is on its cloud journey. This can only be achieved by putting the right data into the hands of the right people, in a timely way, to make the right decisions about how to manage that platform effectively.

The broad umbrella of today's IT security includes standards, tools, technologies, and human practices that reduce risk and protect your systems. System hardening is one conceptual catch-all for those components of IT security — but what does system hardening mean in relation to your actual day-to-day operations? And how do you achieve system hardening without burdening your whole team?

Last week, hundreds of engineering leaders, SREs, platform teams, and developers joined us for Summer Scoop 2025, our biggest launch event yet. The way that we think about our product development at Cortex revolves around all the different types of users who are in our product every day.

Everything looks fine—dashboards are green, logs are quiet. But users start reporting slow response times. No errors, no traffic spikes. Just a general slowdown. It’s a common situation. Not all problems show up as crashes or clear failures. Sometimes, performance degrades quietly, and standard metrics don’t catch it early. But that's where Prometheus alerting can help, if you're monitoring the right signals.

When requests slow down across your microservices, tracing helps you understand where time is spent. Jaeger and Zipkin are two popular tools for distributed tracing, built to answer a simple question: where did the request go? If you're choosing between them or just exploring options, this guide breaks down the differences and when each one might be a better fit.

We’re entering a new era at CloudZero, and we’re coming in hot. This week, we’re not just launching a new feature. We’re taking a major step forward in our mission to make cloud cost efficiency a seamless, engineer-first, business-aligned reality. My team and I are thrilled to introduce CloudZero Optimize, our smartest, most action-oriented optimization solution yet.

AI to streamline software development workflows, from idea to operations.

In a world where database management keeps evolving, following database design best practices is crucial to ensure that your database application keeps performing efficiently. A well-designed database creates a thoughtful relationship between tables and schemas. It enhances application performance, making it work faster, and scales effortlessly. On the other hand, if your database is poorly designed, the application is prone to slow performance and scalability issues.

If you’ve ever deleted records in SQL Server and then noticed your next insert doesn’t start at 1 but maybe jumps to 57, you’ve seen firsthand why it’s important to know how to reseed identity in SQL Server. Identity columns are excellent for auto-generating unique row identifiers; however, they usually don’t reset automatically. This behavior can leave frustrating gaps and disrupt your queries.