Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Modern application observability is essential for ensuring system performance, diagnosing issues, and optimizing user experiences. OpenTelemetry (Otel) and Grafana serve as two key components in achieving end-to-end visibility. While OpenTelemetry focuses on instrumenting applications to collect telemetry data, Grafana specializes in visualizing this data, making it actionable and insightful.

A set of reports just launched by research group Market Connections examines trends in cybersecurity across the US and UK public sectors. Let’s take a look at some key findings.

To unlock the power of observability and advanced analytics of AIOps, teams need to collect exceptional monitoring data, establish connections and correlations between the data, and understand context with the help of robust and current topological maps. Because modern networks often span on-premises, cloud, and hybrid infrastructures, monitoring their performance and troubleshooting issues can be difficult. These complex infrastructures often lead to observability gaps for network teams.

One of the main pieces of advice about Service Level Objectives (SLOs) is that they should focus on the user experience. Invariably, this leads to people further down the stack asking, “But how do I make my work fit the users?”—to which the answer is to redefine what we mean by “user.” In the end, a user is anyone who uses whatever it is you’re measuring.

Every new layer of infrastructure piles onto an already fragile web of interconnected challenges, making it painfully clear: traditional monitoring can’t keep up. You’re drowning in alerts, buried in data, and yet somehow still flying blind when real issues arise. More notifications don’t mean more insight, and more data doesn’t guarantee better decisions.

Are you attempting to connect Honeycomb to a standalone (not hosted with Vercel) Next.js application? Most of the Next.js OpenTelemetry samples in the wild show how to connect Next.js to Vercel’s observability solution when hosting on their platform. But what if you’re hosting your own standalone Next.js server on Node.js? This blog post will get you started ingesting your Next.js application’s telemetry into Honeycomb.

Here at Honeycomb, we emphasize that organizations are sociotechnical systems. At a high level, that means that “wet-brained” people and the stuff they do is irreducible to “dry-brained” computations. That cashes out as the inability to ultimately remove or replace people in organizations with computers, in spite of what artificial general intelligence (AGI) ideologues would have you believe.