Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Somewhere in the IT multiverse, a perfect balance has been achieved between demand for IT services and installed system capacity. Unfortunately, that isn’t our world. IT systems operate in swing periods of idle capacity and overloads, as the ebb and flow of demand is influenced by various internal and external factors.

How your software applications perform is an extremely important factor in determining end-user satisfaction. APM metrics are the key indicators that help business-critical applications achieve peak performance. This article explains APM metrics, their importance, and the core APM metrics used by modern software systems to measure and optimize the performance of their applications.

From networking and servers to databases and applications, the infrastructure is the backbone of an organization's operations. With the rise of digitalization, the need for reliable and efficient infrastructure has become more important than ever. Whether it be transportation systems, communication networks, or energy grids, infrastructure plays a vital role in keeping our society functioning smoothly.

Standardized frameworks play a fundamental role in leveling the playing field and setting the standard within the tech industry, ensuring that everyone has access to the same tools and practices. These frameworks promote best practices and foster innovation and collaboration across different sectors. One example of such a framework is OpenTelemetry, a project that has rapidly gained traction and continued to flourish as an open-source initiative under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

Profiling is emerging as a core pillar of observability, aptly dubbed the fourth pillar, with the OpenTelemetry (OTel) project leading this essential development. This blog post dives into the recent advancements in profiling within OTel and how Elastic® is actively contributing toward it. At Elastic, we’re big believers in and contributors to the OpenTelemetry project.

Cron jobs are tasks set to run by themselves at certain times or intervals. They help with doing repetitive tasks automatically, like backing up data, sending emails, and updating systems. In Node.js, cron jobs can make tasks in applications run by themselves, making things more efficient and reliable. Node.js gives a good way to set these tasks through different libraries and tools.

As the world continues to feel the pressure of climate change, more and more actors in the private sector are implementing solutions to reduce their carbon emissions and slow down global warming. For many organizations, technology is a major focus in their carbon reduction strategy. And most emissions are linked to digital workplace equipment. In fact, the workplace represents 70% of overall IT-related emissions.

Incidents are a stressful time for your team: your service isn't working the way you expect and your customers/stakeholders want to know what's going on. The last thing you want to do is let your team improvise everything when it comes to responding to incidents. Google's own SRE book has great overall tips for incident management, part of which involves "develop(ing) and document(ing) your incident management procedures in advance", which this article dives into.

Monitoring your ClickHouse database is a proactive measure that helps maintain its health and ensure that it continues to meet the needs of your applications and users efficiently. It allows you to address issues before they become critical, ensuring that your database environment is secure, reliable, and performing optimally. In this article, we'll detail how to use the Telegraf agent to collect performance metrics from your ClickHouse clusters, and forward them to a datasource.

Hosted Graphite is a time-series metrics monitoring tool used for application, systems, infrastructure and network monitoring. HostedGraphite is a Hosted Graphite service that offers the full capabilities and benefits of Graphite, without any of the hassle of trying to set up your own open-source Graphite installation.