Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Redoing My Progress WhatsUp Gold Home Lab with Proxmox: A Journey of Failover, Backup and Recovery

Greetings, tech enthusiasts! I hope you’re all doing well. Today, I’m thrilled to share the story of my recent adventure in rearchitecting my home lab with Proxmox. This journey has been a rollercoaster of unexpected challenges, valuable lessons, and rewarding successes. I built a resilient and efficient setup that exceeded my initial expectations by leveraging modern virtualization and storage technologies.

Azure DevOps agent pools: diving deeper

Most of the time the build and deployment pipelines we create will run on compute provided by the Azure DevOps cloud and the only decision we need to make is whether to select a Windows or Linux Agent. Sometimes though, the specification for the VM that Azure DevOps spins up may not be right for our needs. We may need more memory or a particular OS version. This is when custom agents and Agent Pools come into play.

Top 5 EdTech outages detected by StatusGator in April 2025

In April 2025, leading EdTech platforms experienced outages that impacted students, educators, and administrators worldwide. StatusGator’s Early Warning Signals played a key role in identifying and reporting issues before official sources did, enabling schools and institutions to respond swiftly. These real-time alerts helped reduce disruption during critical learning and administrative operations. Here are the top five EdTech outages detected by StatusGator in April.

Top 5 outages detected by StatusGator in April 2025

In April 2025, several major services faced outages that disrupted businesses and users globally. StatusGator provided early detection and real-time updates, helping users stay informed before official announcements. With its Early Warning Signals feature, StatusGator alerted users to potential disruptions even before the affected services acknowledged the issues—giving users a critical edge in responding to outages. Here are the top five outages detected by StatusGator in April.

Why no one talks about querying across signals in observability?

In today’s complex distributed systems, observability has evolved from a nice-to-have feature to a mission-critical engineering discipline. Engineering teams across organizations depend on robust observability to maintain system reliability and quickly diagnose issues when they inevitably arise. However, current observability tooling significantly lags behind user expectations by failing to support a critical capability: querying across different telemetry signals.

Monitor the full end-user experience: k6 browser checks in Synthetic Monitoring are generally available

We continue to evolve Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring to help you simulate even the most complex transactions and user journeys, and proactively monitor the performance of your web applications and APIs. In line with this effort, we’re excited to share that k6 browser checks in Synthetic Monitoring are now generally available.

Top Microsoft Teams Metrics: How to Measure & Improve Call Quality

As an IT professional, you know that Microsoft Teams is only as good as the network it runs on. Poor call quality (choppy audio, frozen video, or sudden disconnections) can disrupt productivity and frustrate users. But how do you pinpoint the root cause? The answer lies in monitoring Microsoft Teams performance metrics.

Dynamic Demands, Dynamic Solutions: IT's Role in the Next AI Workflow Evolution

I have just finished reviewing the Microsoft Work Trend Index Annual Report for 2025, which offers fascinating insights into the next wave of organizational evolution. I am particularly excited about the section titled ‘Journey to the Frontier Firm’ and what is possible in phase three, where employees will harness the power of multiple AI agents, creating an ‘agentic swarm’ capable of executing tasks at a scale and speed previously unimaginable.