Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

So you've got Prometheus up and running, but now you're scratching your head looking at those queries. PromQL (Prometheus Query Language) looks simple on the surface, but it packs some serious power once you know how to wield it. Whether you're debugging production issues at 2 AM or building dashboards that actually tell you something useful, these PromQL tricks will upgrade your monitoring game.

In just a few short years, OpenTelemetry has become the second largest CNCF project behind Kubernetes and is well on its way to becoming an industry standard for collecting and exporting telemetry data. And with KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 just around the corner, there’s no one better to talk to about the state of OpenTelemetry than Ted Young. Ted is the co-founder of OpenTelemetry and serves on the OpenTelemetry Governance Committee.

Note: The original version of this blog post published on ;login: on February 24, 2025. When architecting the flow of observability data such as logs, metrics, traces or profiles, you’ve likely noticed that most solutions ask you to deploy an agent or collector. Understandably, you might be hesitant to deploy yet another application just so you can get your data into your storage system of choice.

When network issues arise, it doesn’t take long for fingers to start pointing—often in the direction of network operations teams. In such moments, being forced to rely on guesswork or speculative theories is the last thing any team wants. Making matters worse, even if answers are found, but it takes too long to arrive at them, the reputational damage, not to mention the negative repercussions of the actual outage, are already done.

In any industry, network downtime and performance issues can have a significant cost. But when it comes to financial services, the impact is even more profound, particularly for revenue-generating applications. Financial service firms and their customers rely constantly on these applications. When these applications experience slowdowns or outages, the impact can extend beyond revenue loss and lead to customer dissatisfaction, reduced employee productivity, and potential reputational damage.

In the hybrid era, it’s simply not feasible for humans to manage complex IT environments without intelligent automation. Cloud computing and big data have led to larger fleets of servers, more storage systems, and more complicated networks than ever before. But there are solutions. The latest step in the evolution of IT operations is applying machine learning (ML) to manage workflows, infrastructure, and services with minimal human intervention.

As technology advances, managing networks becomes increasingly complex. Enterprises need a network that is agile, resilient, and easy to scale. This is where Layer 3 virtual routers, like Console Connect’s CloudRouter, provide an ideal solution for connecting multiple network endpoints, such as clouds, data centres and devices.

Search is the signal. If you want a glimpse into where things are headed, just take a peek at this graph of search interest for Kubernetes Alternatives from the last few years. Cycle is a direct Kubernetes alternative, and having been part of building this company since 2018, I can tell you that this graph is so much more accurate than you can ever imagine. Until late 2021, talking about not using Kubernetes was met with an almost dogmatic intransigence.

Silent failures — like missed cron jobs, database crashes, or backup issues — can cause real damage if they go unnoticed. Traditional monitoring often focuses on requests and server metrics but misses crucial background processes. This creates a significant monitoring blind spot where critical elements of your application can fail without immediate detection. To help eliminate this blind spot, we've introduced AppSignal Wrap.

As digital infrastructures become more complex, businesses need an agile, unified platform that spans traditional on-premises systems to modern cloud-native environments. At Virtana, our latest feature updates across Global View, Container Observability, and Infrastructure Observability are designed to empower you to optimize every layer of your IT ecosystem.