Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Notes from the Field: Migrating from VMware to XenServer

The customer was already using Citrix Provisioning Services (PVS) to deliver Virtual Delivery Agent (VDA) machines. Rather than attempting to migrate existing VMware-based VDAs, which often introduces driver conflicts and legacy dependencies, we followed a proven best-practice approach. We provisioned new VDA machines directly on XenServer using the PVS Virtual Desktop Setup Wizard. This ensured clean builds, free from VMware-specific components, and fully optimized for the XenServer platform.

Why OpenTelemetry instrumentation needs both eBPF and SDKs

As a vendor-neutral open standard, OpenTelemetry has become the default choice for application instrumentation. However, it’s important to remember that OpenTelemetry isn’t a single technology — it’s an ecosystem. Under the hood, it provides multiple options for instrumenting your applications. In this blog post, we explore two instrumentation approaches: OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation and runtime-specific OpenTelemetry SDKs, like the OpenTelemetry Java agent.

Capture high-value traces without managing a pipeline: Tail sampling with Adaptive Traces

Tracing is the richest observability signal in common use today. In distributed systems, it reveals how requests flow across multiple services, allowing you to uncover and address performance bottlenecks. Teams often scale back or abandon tracing altogether, however, because most successful requests produce redundant data that’s noisy and expensive to store.

KubeCon Atlanta 2025 & the AI-Native Shift

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025 in Atlanta marked a definitive moment for cloud-native infrastructure. Over four days, celebrating the 10th anniversary of both CNCF and Kubernetes, more than 9,000 attendees witnessed the ecosystem’s evolution from container orchestration to AI-native operations. The conference delivered a clear message – AI workloads are no longer experimental.

What's New in InfluxDB 3.8: Linux Service Management, Kubernetes Helm Chart, and Smarter Ask AI

InfluxDB 3.8 is now available for both Core and Enterprise, alongside the 1.6 release of the InfluxDB 3 Explorer UI. This release is focused on operational maturity and making InfluxDB easier to deploy, manage, and run reliably in production. InfluxDB 3 Core remains free and open source under MIT and Apache 2 licenses, optimized for recent data. InfluxDB 3 Enterprise builds on that foundation with long-range querying, clustering, security, and full operational tooling.

AI for IT Operations: How AIOps is Transforming IT Performance & Service Reliability

Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations ingests telemetry across logs, traces, events, resource signals, runtime behavior, and application pathways. AI for IT operations reduces alert noise, correlates events into unified narratives, predicts degradation, and drives remediation logic with pattern-based execution. Telemetry growth makes manual triage slow, while inference scales linearly with data.

How To Connect Your Prometheus Server to a Grafana Datasource

Prometheus is one of the most popular open-source monitoring systems in the world. It’s lightweight, easy to deploy, and pairs beautifully with Grafana for dashboards and alerting. If you're running applications or infrastructure on Linux, Prometheus plus one of many Exporters (Redis, NVIDIA GPU, Nginx, etc.) gives you deep visibility into service performance - quickly and reliably.

Building a Code Review system that uses prod data to predict bugs

This post takes a closer look at how Sentry’s AI Code Review actually works. As part of Seer, Sentry’s AI debugger, it uses Sentry context to accurately predict bugs. It runs automatically or on-demand, pointing out issues and suggesting fixes before you ship. We know AI tools can be noisy, so this system focuses on finding real bugs in your actual changes—not spamming you with false positives and unhelpful style tips.

Closing the Year: What 2025 Taught Us About Resilience

By Doreen Jacobi, DERDACK / SIGNL4 It is that time of the year again. Time to reflect and look back at 2025. And I find myself thinking less about platforms and features – and more about the people behind them. The engineers who pick up the phone at 2 a.m. The operators who make judgment calls with incomplete information. The responders who keep systems running when everything feels urgent. If this year taught us anything, it’s this: technology can detect the problem, but people solve it.

Valkey JSON module now available on Aiven for Valkey

The Valkey JSON module implements native JSON data type support within Valkey, allowing users to efficiently store, query, and modify complex, nested JSON data structures directly. This overcomes previous architectural complexities, such as needing to serialize entire documents as strings or flatten data into hashes, by providing native handling for nested data models.