Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Testing database-driven applications is notoriously painful. If your app depends on MySQL, you’ve probably spent hours setting up local databases, running migrations, loading data, and then cleaning everything up just to rerun your tests. This repetitive cycle slows development, breaks pipelines, and introduces inconsistency between local and production environments.

Today, Obkio’s Network Performance Monitoring solution is announcing the release of our all-new Visual Traceroute Tool integrated into Obkio’s application. This feature is a re-invention of Obkio’s standalone Visual Traceroute Tool (Obkio Vision), and has been transformed to help users better understand network path performance and the source of network issues.

Amazon EKS on Fargate is a managed service that reduces the operational overhead of maintaining a Kubernetes cluster by abstracting away the underlying infrastructure. In a serverless Fargate environment, each pod is assigned its own isolated compute resources; there is no direct host-level access.

At every turn, IT leaders are required to prove the value of every technology investment. Technology business management (TBM) practices encourage connecting tech spend directly to business outcomes, demanding accurate data about what’s in your network and how it supports the organization.

Rolling out a powerful AI tool like GitHub Copilot is a big win for any engineering leader. But because it’s such a significant investment, leadership will inevitably ask if it was worth the cost. Until now, answering this was nearly impossible. While GitHub provides adoption stats, connecting that data to real-world performance metrics like cycle time or code quality has been a manual, frustrating process. We built the Cortex AI Impact Dashboard to provide a clear answer.

Every engineering organization measures success differently. A dashboard that’s perfect for one team might be meaningless for another. While out-of-the-box views for DORA are a great starting point, leaders need the ability to define and share the specific combination of metrics that matter most to their business. Without this, you're either forcing your teams to conform to generic reports or wasting time rebuilding the same views every week.

You see MTTR creeping up, but you don’t know why. You could ask your teams, but that means meetings, pulling people off projects, and waiting days for answers. What if you could just…ask? We’re excited to introduce the new strategic AI chief of staff for engineering leadership, powered by the Cortex MCP. By connecting your Engineering Intelligence data with your scorecards and standards, the MCP allows you to have a strategic conversation about your organization’s performance.

This is an updated version of the 2024 article. Maintaining transparent communication about service availability is crucial for businesses of all sizes. Status pages are an important part of your communication strategy during times of outages and maintenance events. You can choose to go with a fully managed status page provider or host an open-source one yourself.

A slow checkout request. A background job stuck waiting on another service. A log message that looks fine — until performance drops. In a Node.js microservices setup, these are the moments that test your observability. You know something's wrong, but tracing the request across dozens of services feels impossible. Distributed tracing changes that. It connects every span in the request's journey, showing exactly where time is spent and where things start to break down.

We’re excited to announce that ilert now offers a native integration with Livewatch, unlocking seamless incident escalation from monitoring to response. Starting today, all alerts generated by Livewatch can be automatically ingested, grouped, escalated, and managed from within ilert – closing the loop between detection and resolution.