Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

A FinOps engineer's guide to governing custom metrics

This guest blog post is authored by Dieter Matzion, a seasoned cloud practitioner who has operated exclusively in public cloud environments since 2013, with experience at leading technology companies including Google, Netflix, Intuit, and Roku. Custom metrics play a crucial role in enabling teams to monitor their applications and businesses. The flexibility of these metrics allows engineers to measure what matters most to their domain.

Telecom Retention Crisis and Why Leading Carriers are Deploying Agentic AI

Telecom executives face a retention crisis that headcount cannot solve. Customers churn within 48 hours of a service incident, and traditional support models, even AI-powered chatbots, respond to problems rather than prevent them. The carriers closing this gap aren't expanding call centers. They're deploying agentic AI that predicts issues, executes resolutions, and learns from every network signal.

Is Your Digital Ads Budget Bleeding Undetected? Here's How to Fix It.

Global ad fraud losses hit $88 billion in 2023 and are projected to reach $172 billion by 2028. For a marketing organization deploying $20 million annually across digital channels, this translates to $1.8-3 million in misallocated capital. Money that could fund two additional demand gen campaigns or expand your martech stack. Worse, fraudulent traffic contaminates your analytics, causing you to double down on underperforming channels while starving high-potential ones.

How to test application resiliency by simulating the Cloudflare December 2025 outage

This fall and winter have had their share of major outages (including AWS, Azure, and Cloudflare), and December was no exception. On December 5, 2025, Cloudflare suffered a 25-minute outage that served responses with HTTP 500 errors to about 28% of HTTP traffic served by Cloudflare. Since Cloudflare handles an average of 81 million HTTP requests per second, this represents a substantial chunk of internet traffic, including LinkedIn, Zoom, and Downdetector.

Synthetic Monitoring & WooCommerce: Detecting Hidden Failures

WooCommerce powers a massive portion of the internet’s commerce layer, largely because it looks simple. Install a plugin, connect Stripe, choose a theme, and suddenly WordPress becomes a store. That perceived simplicity is also what makes WooCommerce fragile in production. WooCommerce stores are not single systems.

How to share and analyze survey data (or other business metrics) in Grafana

Our annual Observability Survey provides some great insights on the state of industry and all things observability. And for the third edition of the survey, published last March, we wanted to bring the results into a Grafana dashboard—not just because we could, but because it was quite a nice way to interact with the data. After all, Grafana isn't just for IT observability. You can use it to monitor everything from BI data to lunar landings to pet pythons—and now, survey data.

Why Businesses Gain Clarity Through Expert Auditing

Clarity stands at the center of durable business growth. Leaders face pressure from regulation, competition, and rising expectations from clients and partners. Decisions carry weight, and small missteps can ripple across finance, governance, and reputation. Expert auditing offers a structured path toward insight, discipline, and confidence. Rather than acting as a narrow compliance task, auditing frames how information flows, how risks surface, and how strategy takes shape. Through skilled examination and independent review, businesses gain a sharper view of their position and options.

12 Proven Strategies to Improve Warehouse Efficiency in 2026

Doing more with less isn't a slogan; it's the empirical fact for warehouses moving into 2026. Order volumes are fluctuating, customer expectations are constantly increasing, and adding more staff isn't always the way out. Efficiency has been made the most manageable lever. Not by cost-cutting, but through improved decisions: where automation brings value, how layouts reduce wasted movement, and how teams are enabled to work more efficiently. That shift is reflected in investment trends, with the warehouse automation market expected to exceed $41.27 billion by 2029.

How Online Stores Are Letting Shoppers 'Try Before They Buy' Without a Fitting Room

The uncertainty that exists within online fashion retail continues to be the single most significant problem experienced when it first became available. Customers will see spectacularly styled product photographs yet remain apprehensive about actually completing their purchase, asking themselves questions such as: Do I really think this is going to fit? Is the colour the same on my computer as it is when I wear it? Does the material fit and hang the same way, etc?

Understanding Today's Biggest Cyber Threats and How Professionals Can Prepare

Cyber threats are growing faster than many organizations can keep up with. As technology becomes more connected and embedded in daily life, the risks around digital systems rise just as quickly. Businesses, individuals, and governments depend on networks, cloud services, and remote tools, and each layer introduces new vulnerabilities. Attackers continually refine their methods, making the threat landscape constantly shift.