Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

An introduction to trace sampling with Grafana Tempo and Grafana Agent

Greetings friends, one and all! Over here on the Field Engineering team, we’re often asked about tracing. Two questions that come up frequently: Do I need to sample my traces? and How do I sample my traces? The folks asking are usually using tracing stores where it’s simply not possible to store all of the traces being generated. Those are great questions and the answers depend on a few different factors.

Status pages can now be viewed as JSON or XML

Next to a large collection of checks, Oh Dear offers the ability to easily create beautiful status pages. This way, you can communicate the status of your sites and services to your users. Take a look at the Oh Dear powered status pages for Flare and Laravel. Today, we added the ability to view the status page as JSON (or XML if that is your thing). You just have to append /json (or /xml to the status page URL. So for the Laravel status page, you'll find the JSON at status.laravel.com/json.

A Guide to PostgreSQL Performance Tuning

PostgreSQL is the most powerful and versatile SQL database available today. There is a problem that comes with this level of power and versatility. How do the developers of PostgreSQL fine-tune the default configuration for everyone? Well, they can't do it. The issue is that each database differs not only in design but also in needs. Some systems are used to store massive amounts of data that are rarely searched.

Technical Metrics to Measure Observability in Marketing

A website's performance can be measured using metrics. Metrics provide information on what is working, what is not, and where improvements are needed. Unlike numbers, spreadsheets, or data, it isn't as complicated or as time-consuming to use. For observability in marketing, website metrics that measure user engagement are vital. By analyzing metrics, the marketing department will be able to determine what web pages are not providing the company with value.

The Hybrid Workplace Requires a New Approach to SaaS Observability

Since we were first parachuted into distributed work in 2020, most companies have now adopted a sustained hybrid workplace. According to a recent Gallup survey, there’s no reason to expect this to change anytime soon. Meanwhile, the last couple of years have simultaneously seen an explosion in the use of SaaS. In fact, 2020 was the first year in which the cloud market became larger than the non-cloud market, and SaaS was the leading cause of this.

Icinga integration cases: OpsBridge and ServiceNow

The health of your systems and applications is fundamental for your organization’s infrastructure. Monitoring them indicates if there are any issues that need to be handled before they become serious and affect your customers. This is why companies often use a plethora of monitoring tools that can spot any irregularities as early as possible. Icinga allows you to monitor a lot of different metrics throughout your ecosystem, with various plugins that are ready-to-use.

Monitor your JumpCloud directory with Datadog

JumpCloud is a cloud-based directory platform that provides a unified approach to Active Directory and LDAP services centered around user authentication and network management. Using JumpCloud, companies can manage and provision user access to software, systems, and networks; enforce compliance with audit trails; and provide a unified login experience through single sign-on (SSO).

Building a Stack Overflow browser as a VS extension

I have been writing a couple of integration with the Stack Overflow API for both the elmah.io app and some public exceptions pages that we launched recently (like System.DivideByZeroException). For this post, I want to show you how to pull data from Stack Overflow with C#. For demo purposes (and TBH because I wanted to play more with Visual Studio extensions), the sample code for this post will end out in a small Visual Studio extension (VSIX).

How to Move Ahead of the Three Pillars of Observability

The acceleration in digitalization, also due to the pandemic, has brought an organization’s business and IT teams and strategic goals closer together than ever before. Chief Information Officers (CIOs) have existed since the early 1980s and, until recently, their typical role was primarily focused on managing the technology infrastructure. But in a post-pandemic world, that role is now expanding beyond traditional IT responsibilities.

Improve Performance in your iOS Applications - Part 2

The performance of your iOS app is crucial when building and publishing it for any number of users. Your users expect it to be delightful, fast and responsive, so if your app seems sluggish or unresponsive, it will affect your reviews and you might lose valuable users. While solving this for your apps, it’s easy to overlook the influence of the choices made on performance throughout development.