Wherever you read about observability, you are told that there are "3 pillars" of observability - Metrics, Traces and Logs. An image that is generally projected is something like this. But wait a minute, why are there only three pillars, and does it really matter to the end user? At the end of the day, users are just trying to solve their problems fast.

One of the easiest ways to see if the application running in our nodes is in an optimized state or not is by monitoring them. It is the last yet critical stage of any software development lifecycle. It opens up many possible improvements in your application, networking, IT automation, and other miscellaneous configurations. As we move towards microservice architecture, containerization and orchestration tools are rising. Containers are special processes that run in isolation from other processes.

It’s time for our monthly product updates. Closing GitHub issues, fixing bugs, shipping code, and sipping coffee, time flies by every month. Last month, we crossed a major milestone of 7000+ GitHub stargazers. We can not thank the developer community enough for supporting us in our mission to democratize observability.

Prometheus and InfluxDB are open-source projects created to make application performance monitoring a breeze. That is, of course, if you choose the option that covers your entire observability scope. This article compares and contrasts the extent to which Prometheus and InfluxDB remedy the need for real-time insights into your applications’ operations. We’ll highlight similarities and overlaps in both usability and practicality.

Single pane of glass monitoring is a term used to denote monitoring applications with a single tool that provides a comprehensive set of dashboards for the entire software system of an organization. Managing multiple monitoring tools for different aspects of the IT system becomes too cumbersome. And that’s how the concept of a single pane of glass monitoring evolved. Most modern applications are now built using distributed software systems.

Docker containers are transient (lasting for a very short time), spawning quickly and in high numbers, which causes metrics bursts. This makes monitoring a challenge due to Docker's scaling and redeployment features. Docker stats is a built-in feature of Docker containers. The docker stats command returns a live data stream of your running containers. Docker is a containerization platform that lets you separate your applications from your infrastructure to deliver software quickly.

OpenTelemetry is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation(CNCF) incubating project aimed at standardizing the way we instrument applications for generating telemetry data(logs, metrics, and traces). However, OpenTelemetry does not provide storage and visualization for the collected telemetry data. And that’s where an OpenTelemetry backend is needed. Cloud computing and containerization made deploying and scaling applications easier.

Prometheus and the Elasticsearch stack are both used for monitoring applications. But while Prometheus is primarily meant to monitor metrics, the Elasticsearch stack or the ELK stack is mainly used to collect, store, analyze, and visualize application logs. In this article, we will see what Prometheus and ELK stack is and compare their differences. Prometheus is a time-series metrics monitoring tool. Prometheus enables you to capture time-series data as metrics.

Every month, our team works on two major fronts: shipping new features asked by users and iterating on shipped features to make them better for existing users. Last month, our team worked closely with users to ship a lot of product improvements both in UI and backend performance. Alongside that, we have been working on metrics builder and log management, two major feature upgrades to SigNoz.

PHP is a widely popular server-side language and enjoys the top spot in terms of market share. Many world-famous organizations like Facebook have their applications written in PHP. WordPress, which powers 43% of all websites, is also built on PHP. In this tutorial, we will use OpenTelemetry to instrument a PHP application for telemetry data. It’s essential to monitor your PHP application for performance issues and bugs.