Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

On December 11, 2025, GitHub experienced intermittent disruptions that frustrated users across the globe. Developers everywhere started seeing random errors, 503s, unicorns, and CI pipeline failures. Very quickly it became clear something was wrong, even though GitHub’s status page still said ALL SYSTEMS OPERATIONAL. After the incident was over, GitHub published a postmortem that revealed the cause: scrapers. Automated tools hit GitHub with enough traffic to overwhelm key backend systems.

Over the past year, the Governance Committee ran user interviews and surveys with organizations deploying OpenTelemetry at scale. A few patterns came up consistently: Stability levels aren't always obvious. When you install an OTel distribution, some components might be experimental or alpha without clear markers. This makes it harder to evaluate what's production-ready. Instrumentation libraries sometimes wait on semantic conventions.

Front‑end bugs are notoriously hard to reproduce. By the time an error shows up in your monitoring tool, the most important context is already gone: what the user actually did. Session replay helps—but only if someone has the time and patience to scrub through recordings, correlate events, and form a hypothesis. That’s where Rollbar’s MCP server, paired with an AI agent like Github Copilot, changes the game.

Enterprise IT teams operate under relentless pressure to maintain seamless connectivity, yet many business leaders underestimate the financial gravity of Network Downtime. Studies consistently show that even a brief outage can cost enterprises hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour, positioning downtime as one of the most disruptive threats to business continuity.

Cloud outages in 2025 ranged from minor ones affecting some sections of users, to major ones affecting hundreds or thousands of users. Services like Cloudflare and AWS on which many other services depend experienced outages that affected many due to the cascading effect. Let's look at some of the major cloud outages in 2025.

Note: A version of this post originally appeared on the CSS Electronics blog. Martin Falch, co-owner and head of sales and marketing at CSS Electronics, is an expert on CAN bus data. Martin works closely with end users, typically OEM engineers, across diverse industries, including automotive, maritime, and industrial. He is passionate about data visualization and AI—and he’s been working extensively with Grafana Assistant.

Highlights of another successful year of customer-centric collaboration Once again, our partnership delivered an impressive year of innovation with Microsoft Azure, Azure AI Foundry, and Azure OpenAI. This blog highlights our continued collaboration with Microsoft to better serve customers throughout 2025 and our key moments at Microsoft Ignite.

Over the past two decades, we’ve witnessed the instrumentation of virtually everything in the aerospace industry, from manufacturing floors to satellites orbiting Earth. And it’s no longer just NASA and other government organizations leading the charge. The commercial space industry has grown exponentially, with private companies developing everything from GPS satellites to electric VTOL aircraft.

The move by Let’s Encrypt from 90-day certificates to 45-day certificates is more than a policy shift. It changes how teams must manage renewals, detect failures, and validate that certificates are deployed consistently across distributed systems. A shorter lifecycle compresses the margin of error. Automation that previously limped along unnoticed now breaks on a far tighter schedule. And every misconfiguration hits users faster.

Reduce alert noise by 70% through intelligent aggregation, clear ownership boundaries, and filtering metrics that don't map to user-facing issues. Monitoring starts with a straightforward goal: understand your system's health and identify issues before users notice them. You set up metrics, create dashboards, and configure some alerts. At first, it works well. Over time, your stack gets bigger and more complicated. New services get added.