Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Top Tips is a weekly column where we highlight what's trending in the tech world and share practical ways to stay ahead. This week, let's look at what happens when we fill every spare moment with digital content, why a little boredom might be useful, and how to make room for it in our screen-filled lives. Imagine you're waiting for your coffee. It's going to take three minutes, so you reach for your phone.

Ask an SAP Basis or security team how they control access to their ERP, and you’ll get a confident answer. User master records, PFCG roles, firefighter IDs, separation of duties policies, and an audit someone reviews regularly. Decades of audit findings have hardened those controls. Ask the same team who can deploy code to their BTP subaccounts, and the answer is far from so confident.

Icinga Notifications 1.0.0 is here: the right people, informed at the right time. Monitoring only helps if the right person hears about a problem at the right moment. That is what Icinga Notifications does. Version 1.0.0 is the first stable release, and we consider it ready for production use. With it, you decide who gets notified, how and when. You also see at a glance which problems are open and who takes care of them. In this post, we show you what this means for your daily work and how to get started.

VoIP is usually the first application to break when a network degrades. Calls run in real time over UDP, so a lost or late packet can't be resent. It's simply missing audio. A connection that handles email, file transfers and web browsing without complaint can still make every call sound broken. That's also why VoIP problems are hard to troubleshoot.

Catchpoint is now LogicMonitor Digital Experience. Co-founder Mehdi Daoudi reflects on the work connecting Internet and user experience visibility with LogicMonitor’s infrastructure insights, and how that progress advances the company’s Autonomous IT vision.

Amazon told its own engineers this week to stop tokenmaxxing. The memo circulated internally in September and Amazon published it on Tuesday, Oct. 27. Tokenmaxxing is the practice of using AI as heavily as possible with little regard for whether the output justifies the spend. The memo calls token usage, adoption rates, and code-change counts “deeply flawed” ways to measure a team.

Activity categorization classifies every AI request by the work it performs, such as meeting prep, code review or account research, then assigns that spend to the team, person, model and provider behind it. It turns a provider invoice that shows only totals by model and API key into a breakdown finance can allocate, charge back and budget from. CloudZero AI Signals does this as the spend happens.

Most cost questions get answered the same way. You read a chart and the table under it together. Maybe you spot a jump on the chart, and then you go looking in the table for the service, account, or team that caused it. When you can see more of that table while the chart is still in view, the whole review goes faster. You’re also a lot less likely to lose your place halfway through.

Honeybadger Insights is pretty great. It's even greater when you connect it to Cloudflare and start shipping logs directly from Cloudflare Workers to Insights. If you're already using Cloudflare to distribute your applications, it's easy to set up. Cloudflare Workers logs capture what your application is doing at the edge: console.log() output, uncaught exceptions, and system-generated logs for each request.

If we were to reduce web performance into a single term, it would be “web vitals”. Web vitals are a universal signal that every developer can measure, and more importantly, optimize for. They describe many facets of the user experience when it comes to performance, but they were limited to specific types of navigations. Capturing web vitals for your apps has been largely about users landing on your site from somewhere else. We measured that experience and you optimized for it.