Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) might not always be the loudest name in the cloud room. But it’s gradually become a powerhouse for organizations running data-intensive, AI/ML, and global-scale applications. We also can’t ignore that GCP offers a backbone powered by Google’s own infrastructure (the same one that runs YouTube, Gmail, and Search).

Why are we still handling IT incident response like it’s 2014? Every day, ITOps teams are flooded with alerts, spread thin across hybrid systems, and stuck trying to stitch together visibility from solutions that don’t talk to each other. The incidents keep coming, but the tools aren’t getting smarter—and the humans are burned out. Even with best practices in place, response is often slow, inconsistent, and reactive. You chase symptoms instead of solving problems.

As part of our big tent philosophy at Grafana Labs, we think you should be able to dig into your data and find meaningful insights — wherever that data happens to live. For many of our users, that data lives in Databricks, the open analytics platform for building, deploying, sharing, and maintaining enterprise-grade data, analytics, and AI solutions at scale.

Prometheus is one of the most popular open source monitoring tools due to its powerful flexibility for collecting time series metrics. But raw metrics aren’t always helpful on their own. That’s where Grafana Cloud comes in. By connecting Prometheus to Grafana Cloud, you get rich visualizations, alerts, and dashboards that make your data actionable without having to manage any additional infrastructure.

Real estate professionals have said for years that the three most important factors about a property are location, location, and location. Well, for organizations with a web presence — which these days is the vast majority, and 100% of e-commerce companies — the three most important factors about their site are visitor experience, visitor experience, and (let’s all say it together!) visitor experience.

In a world where AI and automation are redefining enterprise IT, there’s one harsh truth that often gets overlooked: most automation initiatives fail before they begin. Not because the technology isn’t ready, but because the strategy isn’t. Too often, teams fall into well-worn traps—automation anti-patterns—that stall progress, waste resources, and fail to deliver meaningful impact. Let’s call them what they are: automation mistakes.

For a while, tracing in Sentry was... fine. You could open up a slow transaction, poke around, find the N+1, and feel like a hero. But if you wanted to answer more complex questions - like why your payment API was getting slower in Europe, or which CDN was silently tanking your image loads - things got harder. We didn't really build it to help with answering broad questions.

InfluxDB 3 is our latest time series database built for real-time analytics and high-volume data. Its Python Processing Engine lets developers run custom scripts known as plugins to process data, trigger alerts, or integrate with external systems via HTTP web requests. To demonstrate what’s possible, we’ve developed several plugins, all of which are available in the influxdb3_plugins GitHub repository. This public repo is open for anyone to use, modify, and contribute to.

Database performance can make or break your Elixir application. While Ecto provides a powerful toolkit for database interactions, understanding how these operations perform in production is critical. Whether you're dealing with slow queries, connection pool issues, or mysterious N+1 problems, the ability to effectively monitor and optimize your database operations can be the difference between a sluggish application and one that delights your users.

Why should you monitor PowerShell?…. PowerShell is a powerful automation tool, however its capabilities also make it a prime target for exploitation by cyber attackers. Implementing a robust, automated PowerShell monitoring solution is now essential to detect and prevent exploitation attacks before they compromise your systems. PowerShell is a powerful scripting tool that can automate tasks and manage systems, but its flexibility also makes it a target for abuse.