Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

APIs are a big part of how modern applications or services work. They act as bridges, allowing systems to talk to each other and share data. Whether it's logging into an app or making an online payment, an application programming interface helps make that process smooth. But what happens when an API suddenly stops working? Even a short outage can cause a disruption. It can break features, delay operations, and impact users and businesses alike.

SQL is just for querying relational data, right? Well, not necessarily! With our SQL Analytics feature, you can run SQL queries over all types of data from all kinds of backend stores. This gives you incredible flexibility and power – you can even combine different types of entity (e.g. a pull request and a pipeline run) in a single query. Equally, I could have datasets with job tickets from Jira, ServiceNow and Zendesk and combine them in a single query.

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.

Take our maturity quiz today and see where your automation maturity stacks up! Let’s call a spade a spade: Automation isn’t just a “nice to have” anymore. Automation is business-critical for speed, scalability, and resilience. It’s a mechanism of survival in today’s hyper-modern state of business. But the reality is that not every team is on the same page when it comes to automation.

Checkmk launched Checkmk Cloud (SaaS) in February 2025, which is a fully managed, cloud-based version of their monitoring technology. This solution, designed for ease of use, allows enterprises to start monitoring their IT infrastructure with no installation, maintenance, or manual upgrades required. The SaaS version is compatible with both cloud-based and on-premises systems, bringing them together under a single, straightforward platform.

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.

One might think that, considering how effective some companies are at logging everything we do to serve us ads, they’d at least apply that to help us understand what’s happening on our systems and monitor their performance and security. But in the case of Windows, traditional logs fall short — and that’s where the importance of Sysmon comes in. Sysmon is a Windows service that logs operating system activity into the event log.

This article introduces the key components of VictoriaMetrics and explains how they work together as part of a complete monitoring system. VictoriaMetrics is a top-tier monitoring solution known for its speed and low-resource consumption. It includes components for monitoring, alerting, data visualization, querying, scraping, incremental backups, and more.