Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Let’s be honest, most AI (Artificial Intelligence) tools today are relatively smart but not always super useful. You ask them to explain something, write an email, maybe generate some code, but the moment you want them to do something real, like schedule a meeting, file a bug report, or move stuff across your tools, they just stare blankly. That’s where MCP comes in. MCP stands for Model Context Protocol.

Troubleshooting failed cron jobs without proper logging can be frustrating. Ubuntu cron logs record the execution of scheduled tasks, helping you identify what's working and what isn't. This guide covers what engineers need to know about Ubuntu cron logs – from finding them to analyzing their contents and setting up effective monitoring solutions.

SQL Server’s filtered index is one of the most effective features for improving query performance and reducing index maintenance. Whether you’re working with big tables that don’t have much data or queries that constantly filter by the same conditions, filtered indexes offer a smart way to focus only on the rows that matter most.

Monitoring doesn't always need to be complex. In this guide, we'll show you how to transform some raw logs into usable metrics using a lightweight, open-source setup. We'll also use the Telegraf agent to convert logs into Graphite metrics that you can easily visualize and alert on. This is ideal for system admins, DevOps beginners, or anyone interested in building more innovative monitoring pipelines from scratch.

You spin up a few test environments. Someone forgets to shut one down. A cost spike hits your Azure bill. And no one saw it coming. Does this sound familiar? Surprise cloud bills are still a thing today. For teams trying to balance innovation with financial discipline, the Azure Budget feature offers a first line of defence against surprise cloud costs.

When Solr performance degrades, everyone notices - except maybe your monitoring system. The right metrics can alert you to problems before your users start complaining. This guide walks through the essential Solr metrics that matter for production deployments.

Choosing the right observability setup isn’t just a checkbox—it affects how quickly you can detect issues, debug them, and keep your systems reliable. CloudWatch and OpenTelemetry take different paths to that goal: one is a managed service tightly coupled with AWS, the other a flexible, open-source framework that's becoming a go-to in modern monitoring stacks.

PagerDuty. You’ve probably heard it mentioned during outages or seen it in tech forums. Maybe your DevOps team talks about it, or you found it while looking for ways to handle system failures. So, what is PagerDuty exactly? And why do teams rely on it? This post breaks down PagerDuty in simple terms, explores its key features and benefits, and shows you how to get started. We’ll also introduce you to a PagerDuty alternative that might work better for your team’s needs.