Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Once upon a time in the world of metrics, Wavefront was a pioneer. Before Prometheus took over and tools like OpenTelemetry unified tracing and metrics, Wavefront brought something novel to the table: human-readable metrics with real-time querying and tag-based dimensionality. In enterprise environments running VMware or early microservices, it offered a scalable way to understand a system's behavior. But as the telemetry landscape evolved, many systems that spoke Wavefront were left behind.

Throughout this blog series, we’ve followed how AI reshapes network operations – from foundational data harmonization to real-time correlation, from contextual insights to agent-driven automation, and most recently, to conversational access through natural language interfaces. But we haven’t reached the final destination.

Within the utility sector, a lot is changing. Utilities continue to pursue digital transformation, altering the way services are delivered and operations are managed. What hasn’t changed is the criticality of the services provided. These organizations deliver essential resources like natural gas, electricity, and water—services that we as consumers rely upon constantly for our comfort, sustenance, communications, and more.

In my role as Senior Observability Architect here at Grafana Labs, one of the things I focus on is making sure customers are getting the most out of our products. Recently, I noticed a trend where customers were struggling to get SAML authentication configured properly. They were getting stuck on some of the steps needed to configure the users key pair values, which allows users to log in with the correct roles assigned in Grafana.

Prometheus is supposed to help you monitor your stack, not become the thing you need to monitor. But if you’ve ever seen it spike in CPU and slow everything down, you know that’s not always the case. High Prometheus CPU usage usually shows up when you're scraping too many metrics, using expensive queries, or running with default configs that don’t fit your workload. This guide covers how to track Prometheus CPU usage, what typically causes it, and how to fix it.

VPC Flow Logs come with a default format that gives you basic network traffic details. But you can tweak the format to capture exactly what you need. This can lower costs, speed up processing, and make your logs fit better with what you’re trying to monitor. If you want to improve security, keep an eye on performance, or save money, adjusting your VPC logs can make a big difference. Let’s take a look at some practical ways to customize your logs beyond the default settings.

On May 1st, AWS corrected a long-standing billing bug tied to Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) data transfers between Availability Zones (AZs) and regions. That fix triggered a noticeable increase in charges for many users, especially for those with high traffic volumes or distributed architectures. The problem wasn’t new usage; it was a silent correction to an old error.

If developing scalable, agile applications is a priority for your business, microservices may provide a compelling solution. But what are microservices exactly? The proper microservices definition refers to a modern architectural approach where an application is built as a collection of loosely coupled services. Each service is independent, self-contained, and designed around a specific business capability.