Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Snowflake is a powerful, cloud-based data platform designed for high-performance analytics. Whether you're running massive analytical queries, managing structured and semi-structured data, or optimizing data pipelines, visibility into your Snowflake instance is essential. Performance bottlenecks, query execution delays, and unexpected cost spikes can quickly become issues without proper monitoring.

This weekend, I binge-watched Netflix’s new series Zero Day, starring Robert De Niro. The series has sparked excitement and curiosity among cybersecurity enthusiasts and political thriller fans alike. As the title suggests, the show revolves around a cyberattack that exploits unknown vulnerabilities—so-called “zero days”—to wreak havoc on critical systems. But what if the organizations targeted in Zero Day had the right cybersecurity strategy in place?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping industries worldwide, and Sub-Saharan Africa is no exception. Across the region, governments, businesses, and start-ups are recognising the potential of AI to drive economic growth, improve efficiencies, and enhance decision-making. Yet, as AI adoption accelerates, so does the demand for robust digital infrastructure, including high-performance computing, data centres, and connectivity.

OpenTelemetry is a big, big project. It’s so big, in fact, that it can be hard to know what part you’re talking about when you’re talking about it! One particular critique I’ve seen going around recently, though, is about how OpenTelemetry is just ‘three pillars’ all over again. Reader, this could not be further from the truth, and I want to spend some time on why.

When you think about “AI reliability,” what comes to mind? If you’re like most people, you’re probably thinking of generative AI model accuracy, like responses from ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, and Sora. While this is certainly important, there’s an even more fundamental type of reliability: the reliability of the infrastructure that your AI models and applications are running on. AI infrastructure is complex, distributed, and automated, making it highly susceptible to failure.

OpenTelemetry is an open-source observability framework designed to instrument, generate, collect, and export telemetry data, including traces, metrics, and logs. It is vendor-agnostic, allowing developers to send data to multiple backend services like Last9, Prometheus, Datadog, or Jaeger without vendor lock-in. For Next.js applications, OpenTelemetry is particularly useful due to the framework’s hybrid rendering approach.

If you've ever deployed a distributed system at scale, you know things break—often in ways you never expected. That’s where Chaos Engineering comes in. But running chaos experiments without robust observability is like debugging blindfolded. This guide will walk you through how observability empowers Chaos Engineering, ensuring that your experiments yield meaningful insights instead of just causing chaos for chaos’ sake.

Prometheus is one of the most popular open-source monitoring and alerting tools. Setting up Prometheus with Docker Compose can make your monitoring stack easier to deploy and manage if you're running containerized applications. This guide will walk you through everything you need to get Prometheus up and running with Docker Compose, from installation to configuration and setting up basic alerts.

Managing SD-WAN at scale? Multi-region setups streamline operations, cut down tunnel overload, and improve network efficiency with a structured backbone. In centralized SD-WAN solutions, managing traffic flows quickly becomes a challenge. Every change to centralized policies not only takes time but also carries the risk of errors that can impact the entire network – definitely not something to tackle on a Friday afternoon!

On the information superhighway, an IP address is a series of numbers telling the location of a digital resource, similar to having a street address for a building. However, when all you know is the street address, you have no idea what the building itself looks like. If you’re a visual person, you might insert that address into Google Maps to pull up a picture of the building so you have a marker to help find a drive.