I’ve spent over 25 years in tech product marketing and customer support, working with pioneering companies like Dell/EMC, Apple, Keeper Security, and now, SolarWinds. In my current role, I’ve had the privilege of helping organizations of all sizes achieve comprehensive observability in their IT environments. I’ve also witnessed firsthand the challenges that can arise on this journey.

At Coroot, we started using eBPF to give users insights into their system performance without needing them to change code or redeploy services. This approach not only makes setup easier but also ensures full visibility, even for third-party and legacy services. To truly achieve this, though, the tool needs to support a wide range of application protocols. Coroot has long supported popular ones like HTTP, gRPC, Postgres, MySQL, Redis, Memcached, MongoDB, Kafka, and Cassandra.

We recently released Refinery 2.9, which came with great performance improvements. Reading through the release notes, I felt the need to write a piece on this improvement, as it’s quite important but easy to overlook: collect loop taking too long. This is the story of how we used distributed tracing to find the slowdown in this loop.

In formal terms, OpenTelemetry is an open source framework used for instrumenting, generating, collecting, and exporting telemetry data for applications, services, and infrastructure. It provides vendor-neutral tools, SDKs and APIs for generating, collecting, and exporting telemetry data such as traces, metrics, and logs to any observability backend, including both open source and commercial tools.

Observability tools are crucial for maintaining the seamless performance and reliability of systems. Dynatrace has been one of the leading solutions for monitoring and observability over the past few years. However, there are many alternatives that provide similar features, often at more accessible price points and with unique capabilities. In this article, we will explore the best Dynatrace alternatives for 2025 to help you find the right fit for your organization.

New Relic has established itself as a top observability platform with full-stack monitoring. Unifying all telemetry data — metrics, events, logs, and traces — into one platform delivers deep performance insights and enables faster troubleshooting without juggling multiple tools. Also, New Relic prioritizes developers with tools like CodeStream, integrating error details and telemetry directly into the IDE.

I’ve read a steadily increasing stream of articles about using AI in SRE, and I have yet to find one that inspires my trust. Each article makes impressive claims about the capabilities of AI and the way it can be applied to SRE tasks, but the vast majority are light on details. AI tools, and especially LLMs, are growing incredibly quickly, and I feel that these tools have a ton of potential.

In the area of IT infrastructure management, three terms often surface: observability, monitoring, and telemetry. These concepts, while interconnected, each play a unique role in maintaining system health and performance. Observability, monitoring, and telemetry form the backbone of any robust IT environment. Yet, their differences and interrelations can sometimes blur, leading to confusion. This article aims to demystify these terms, providing clarity on their distinct roles and how they work together.

Log management tools provide visibility into the performance and behavior of systems, applications, networks, and infrastructure components. By collecting and analyzing logs, you can monitor for anomalies, track trends, and identify potential issues before they escalate. Choosing the right log management solution requires careful consideration of several factors to ensure that it meets your specific needs and goals. Here are the most popular open source log management tools to help you choose.

Jaeger, a renowned distributed tracing system, has been a trusted companion for developers and operations teams seeking to unravel the complexities of microservices architectures. However, as the landscape continues to evolve, the time has come to explore Jaeger alternatives that offer distinct features and advantages.