Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Each year, financial services organizations handle billions of transactions, through which trillions of dollars of commerce flow. Customers expect key services, from online banking and cash transfers to payroll services, to be available around the clock, just as they expect their assets, data, and identities to be kept secure. Meanwhile, financial institutions themselves must be able to maintain ongoing communication with clearing houses, stock markets, payment processors, and other relevant parties.

In the not-too-distant past, building software was relatively straightforward. The simplicity of LAMP stacks, Rails, and other well-defined web frameworks provided a stable foundation. Issues were isolated, systems failed in predictable ways, and engineers had time to innovate on new features for the business. And it was good.

Welcome to the Inside Elastic blog series, where we showcase Elastic's internal operations solving real-world business challenges. This specific series will shed light on our journey to integrate generative AI into our customer success and support operations, providing you with a behind-the-scenes look at our process. We’re blogging about this capability as we’re building it, and we’re excited for you to join the ride!

Redis is no longer open source. In March 2024 the project was relicensed, leaving its vast community confused. But the community did not give up, and started work to fork Redis to keep it open. On my recent OpenObservabilty Talks episode, I delved into Valkey, a prominent fork of Redis.

I'm excited to share that Gartner has included Monitoring as Code (MaC) as an emerging practice to their Hype Cycles for SREs again, the second year in a row. Since we founded Checkly, our vision has been that monitoring should sit in your repository, be codified, and scale with your software development. There is no alternative to MaC as it allows your engineering team(s) to work together, create and maintain checks, and ultimately own their monitoring.

As first announced during Sentry Launch Week, we have been working on shipping a major release of our JavaScript SDKs. This update makes getting started with Sentry JavaScript SDKs (even more) straightforward. This release broadens the number of frameworks and libraries where we provide automatic instrumentation, meaning you can access telemetry data in Sentry on day one, without configuration.

Testing NetFlow used to require time, expertise, and lab equipment. Using Kentik and the new Kappa agent, it can be done in minutes with nothing more than a spare Linux machine.

Monitoring all of your organization’s logs can be challenging particularly when these logs are generated by various systems, applications, and devices, often in a variety of different formats. As well as this, the sheer amount of logs produced can be overwhelming, sifting through vast amounts of log data to find relevant information becomes time-consuming and inefficient. This highlights the need for a centralized log management that can alleviate these difficulties.

If you operate in FinOps, are part of an MSP, or work for an enterprise utilizing the cloud, you’re likely familiar with the latest updates on CloudHealth after its acquisition by Broadcom. Since 2018, CloudHealth has been closely tied to the term “acquired,” initially by VMware and now by Broadcom, creating an ongoing change cycle. Clients and prospects are understandably cautious when observing CloudHealth as the climate uncertainty and instability grow.

Splunk is a powerful unified security and observability tool that analyzes data and logs. Splunk allows you to monitor and visualize data in real-time. It analyzes machine-generated data and logs through a web interface. It was acquired by Cisco in a $28 billion deal. While Splunk is a powerful platform, it might not suit your needs. In this post, we discuss 11 top Splunk alternatives that you can consider. Splunk provides a wide range of tools for analyzing and visualizing your data fast and at scale.