Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Understanding the state of your systems and their underlying infrastructure at all times is paramount for ensuring the stability and reliability of your services. Up-to-date information about the performance and health of your deployments not only helps your team react to issues in real time, but it also gives them the security to make changes with confidence and to safely forecast system failures or performance hiccups even before they occur.

Using Prometheus and Grafana together is a great combination of tools for monitoring an infrastructure. In this article, we will discuss how Prometheus can be connected with Grafana and what makes Prometheus different from the rest of the tools in the market. MetricFire's product, Hosted Graphite, runs Graphite (a Prometheus alternative) with Grafana dashboards for you so you can have the reliability and ease of use that is hard to get while doing it in-house.

Prometheus is an increasingly popular tool in the world of SREs and operational monitoring. Based on ideas from Google’s internal monitoring service (Borgmon), and with native support from services like Docker and Kubernetes, Prometheus is designed for a cloud-based, containerized world. As a result, it’s quite different from existing services like Graphite. ‍ Starting out, it can be tricky to know where to begin with the official Prometheus docs and the wave of recent Prom content.

It’s no secret that anyone can download our open source software and run it, because — once more with feeling — open source is in our DNA. But it can be hard to set up and configure a whole stack from scratch, which is why we offer Grafana Cloud as a fully managed observability platform.

Today we are happy to announce that after many delays, re-writes, pushbacks and restructuring Icinga for Windows v1.11.0 is finally released! First, we would like to thank everyone for contributing feedback over the past month to track down issues and testing new integrations.

Not to be confused with the popular children’s TV character, DORA is a new EU regulation for the financial sector, which stands for the Digital Operational Resilience Act. DORA became law on 16 January 2023 and will start to apply from 17 January 2025, so it’s crucial that senior executives in the financial sector, such as Chief Risk Officers and Chief Information Security Officers, understand its implications and prepare for compliance from day one.

Grouped aggregations are a core part of any analytic tool, creating understandable summaries of huge data volumes. Apache Arrow DataFusion’s parallel aggregation capability is 2-3x faster in version 28.0.0 for queries with a large number (10,000 or more) of groups.

AWS DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database provided by Amazon Web Services. It is a fast and flexible database service which has been built for scale.

When used properly, serverless technologies like AWS Lambda can lower the cost of running a system. This is because you only pay for these services when you’re using them, so you don’t waste any money. Serverless technologies also have other benefits. They can provide better security, built-in redundancy and scalability. The biggest plus is that they let you do more with less time and effort. You can focus on the things that directly add value to your business.

Synthetic monitoring in Cloud Monitoring lets you test the availability, consistency, and performance of your web applications from the perspective of a real user.