Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

If you’re reading this, chances are you’re already familiar with OpenTelemetry (OTel)—the open-source standard for collecting observability data. But what about OpenTelemetry agents? How do they work, and why do they matter? This guide unpacks everything you need to know about OTel agents—where they fit in your stack, how to set them up, and common pitfalls to watch out for. Let’s get into it.

When evaluating CI/CD platforms, it can be easy to view them as commodities — interchangeable tools that accomplish the same basic tasks. But as development teams scale, small differences in platform performance can be compounded, significantly impacting development velocity and resource utilization. To better understand these differences, we conducted a head-to-head comparison between CircleCI and GitHub Actions, focusing specifically on performance at enterprise scale.

We are happy to announce our latest project at MetricFire: a brand-new CLI tool! Get ready to start monitoring your systems in one step - no need to modify any configuration files manually. Just run a terminal command, follow the prompts, and forward your system metrics to Hosted Graphite in minutes. In this article, we’ll share an overview of the Hosted Graphite CLI, why we’re making it, and how we’re making it.

Progressive Delivery strategies like Blue/Green deployments, canary releases, feature flag rollouts, and feature delivery platforms help teams release safely, limit risk, and accelerate learning. Each approach builds toward sustainable, high-velocity software delivery by minimizing downtime and maximizing feedback. Combining these methods enables faster innovation with greater confidence and control. Last week we walked The Path To Progressive Delivery. This week, we go deeper.

Jenkins is the backbone of many CI/CD pipelines, automating builds, tests, and deployments at scale. However, when handling high-traffic workloads, such as during peak development hours, large-scale deployments, or parallel builds and pipelines, Jenkins can quickly become a resource hog, leading to slow builds, queue backlogs, and even system crashes. Optimizing resource usage is essential to ensure smooth, efficient, and scalable performance.

One of the biggest causes of outages and incidents is good old-fashioned human error. Despite all of our best intentions, we can still make mistakes, like forgetting to change defaults, making small typos, or leaving conflicting timeouts in the code. It’s why 27.8% of unplanned outages are caused by someone making a change to the environment. Fortunately, reliability testing can help you catch these errors before they cause outages.

AWS cost monitoring tools enable you to track your resource consumption and costs associated with running operations on the AWS platform. These tools vary in capabilities but typically offer customizable reporting, dashboarding, data analytics, built-in automation, and cost alerting. Keep in mind that AWS monitoring differs from AWS management in that monitoring provides usage and cost data without necessarily offering optimization tools.