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.

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.

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.

The threat landscape for cloud-native environments like Kubernetes is always on the move. Attackers continuously apply sophisticated techniques. Cryptojacking, the unauthorized use of computing resources to mine cryptocurrency, is a particularly concerning threat. Cryptojacking can lead to performance degradation, increased operational costs, and potential security breaches. Recent high-profile incidents underscore the importance of addressing these threats.

Internet latency, the often-overlooked delay between sending and receiving data, can mean the difference between a flawless video conference and a frustrating, glitchy mess. Measured in milliseconds (ms), these microscopic delays accumulate, creating tangible performance issues across all online activities.

Monitoring complex PHP applications can be challenging. When systems span multiple services and environments, traditional logging approaches often fall short. OpenTelemetry offers a solution - an open-source, vendor-neutral framework that standardizes how we collect and export telemetry data. This guide covers practical implementation steps for DevOps engineers working with PHP applications.

When setting up an Elasticsearch cluster, one of the most common use cases is to ingest and search through logs. This blog post focuses on getting a benchmark that will tell you how well your cluster will handle your workload. It allows you to create a reproducible environment for testing things out. Do you want to change the mapping of something, drop some fields, alter the ingest pipeline?

PagerDuty. You’ve probably heard it mentioned during outages or seen it in tech forums. Maybe your DevOps team talks about it, or you found it while looking for ways to handle system failures. So, what is PagerDuty exactly? And why do teams rely on it? This post breaks down PagerDuty in simple terms, explores its key features and benefits, and shows you how to get started. We’ll also introduce you to a PagerDuty alternative that might work better for your team’s needs.

Choosing the right observability setup isn’t just a checkbox—it affects how quickly you can detect issues, debug them, and keep your systems reliable. CloudWatch and OpenTelemetry take different paths to that goal: one is a managed service tightly coupled with AWS, the other a flexible, open-source framework that's becoming a go-to in modern monitoring stacks.

When Solr performance degrades, everyone notices - except maybe your monitoring system. The right metrics can alert you to problems before your users start complaining. This guide walks through the essential Solr metrics that matter for production deployments.