Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Traditional databases store data in structured tables, whereas NoSQL (non-SQL) databases use more flexible, non-tabular storage methods. NoSQL databases can store a wider range of data types, including document stores, wide columns, key-value stores, and graphs. These databases first emerged in the late 2000s to support massive horizontal scaling and high-throughput workloads for web applications.

Technology leaders often face a tempting proposition from their engineering teams: “We could build this ourselves.” It’s a natural instinct, especially when discussing incident management systems. Your team’s confidence isn’t misplaced – they absolutely could build a basic alerting system. However, the question isn’t about capability; it’s about strategic resource allocation and long-term operational excellence.

Azure environments are growing fast, and so are the challenges of monitoring them at scale. In this blog, part of our Azure Monitoring series, we look at how real ITOps and CloudOps teams are moving beyond Azure Monitor to achieve hybrid visibility, faster troubleshooting, and better business outcomes. These real-life customer stories show what’s possible when observability becomes operational. Want the full picture? Explore the rest of the series.

When SentinelOne, a leader in cybersecurity and endpoint protection, experienced a major outage last week, thousands of organizations were suddenly left in the dark. With SentinelOne down for hours, IT and security teams scrambled for information and updates. But there was a critical missing piece: SentinelOne has no public status page. This gap left customers frustrated, searching for answers on social media, Reddit, and unofficial channels.

The scarcity of labor resources and high costs of robotics ownership are pushing fulfillment companies to rethink their automation strategies. Zebra addressed these challenges head on in a recent Making the Case report published in collaboration with Modern Materials Handling. This report delves into the top challenges fulfillment operations are dealing with on the robotics front today.

In backend engineering, many days follow a familiar rhythm: coffee, code reviews, maybe deploying a new feature. But occasionally, the routine is interrupted by a message that signals a different kind of challenge, like a Slack notification from the security team: “Hey, we’ve identified a potential issue. Need to sync up.” This post details one such instance—our journey addressing CVE-2024-21626, a privilege escalation vulnerability reported in Rancher.

Managing and deploying applications across multiple Kubernetes clusters presents significant challenges, especially as the number of clusters grows. Traditional methods, like manually applying Helm charts or manifests per cluster, become cumbersome, error-prone, and difficult to scale or maintain consistency for Day 2 operations. While Rancher allows managing Helm chart repositories and apps, this is done on a per-cluster basis via the UI.

The familiar scene unfolds: Critical applications are sluggish, user complaints are mounting, and the IT war room is buzzing. Eyes quickly dart towards the network team. It’s an almost instinctual reaction. But what happens when the problem isn't within the corporate LAN or even the data center? What if the real culprit lurks somewhere in the vast, untamed wilderness of the internet, a cloud provider's backbone, or a third-party SaaS application’s infrastructure?

When most people picture a data centre, they might think of a bland industrial shell—cold, humming, and forgettable. But look closer, and you’ll find something far more profound. A data centre is a heavy, complex, and finely tuned space where an immense volume of information flows, transforms, and creates the digital world we rely on. In many ways, it feels like magic. And yet, so does nature. Both deserve respect.

Ever wondered how Icinga 2 manages all those variables, and how it knows which one to use? In this blog post, we will explore all the different variable scopes in Icinga 2, and by the end, you will know what this mysterious error message means when you see it in your logs.