This blog is about how to communicate changes in your application monitoring process as your operations, environments and services evolve. Approaching your operations with a “monitoring as code” mindset - which means automating as much of the entire observability lifecycle, including automated diagnosis, alerting and incident management, and even automated remediation - is foundational to the success of your operational technology.

If you use Windows, you want to monitor Windows Events. With our latest contribution to the observIQ OpenTelemetry Collector, you can easily monitor Windows Events with OpenTelemetry. You can utilize this receiver in conjunction with any OTel collector: including the OpenTelemetry Collector and observIQ’s distribution of the collector. Below are steps to get up and running quickly with observIQ’s distribution, and shipping Windows Event logs to a popular backend: Google Cloud Ops.

CrowdStrike is a class-leading endpoint monitoring solution. It collects a wealth of activity data from each managed endpoint that can be fairly voluminous. This includes network connectivity, DNS request, process activity, health checks, and the list goes on. In fact, there are over 400 event types reported by CrowdStrike! These events are a gold mine for threat hunters and blue teams looking for unusual or malicious activity. It can be extremely costly to place all this data in a SIEM.

Apache Zookeeper is a great tool used by many popular tools. Your Kafka uses Zookeeper, your HDFS uses it, your SolrCloud uses it, and your ClickHouse may also be using it. No matter where you are using Apache Zookeeper, it is usually a crucial piece of the infrastructure and it needs to be reliable and fast.

If you have any experience with comparing the leading tools in observability then it is very likely that you will have come across Splunk & ELK during your research. These two titans have provided a swiss army knife of useful tools to many developers, cybersecurity specialists and devops professionals over the years since their inception. In this guide, we’ll be comparing these two leading SIEM tools against each other to help you to decide on which solution will help your security use case.

Earlier this year Gartner published a report discussing OpenTelemetry and its place in enhancing Application Performance Monitoring (APM).

AWS Transit Gateway is a service that makes it easy to connect multiple Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), AWS accounts, AWS Regions, and on-premises networks together through a central hub. For AWS customers operating at global scale with many accounts and VPCs, AWS Transit Gateway greatly simplifies AWS networking architecture by eliminating the need to manage complex peering relationships and massive route tables.

No matter how well-designed, flashy, or useful your application is for your target users, they may not take kindly to it being slow or, even worse, crashing once in a while. You will lose customers and revenue as a result. The solution is definitely not to add additional features to the application to bring back users. Instead, it’s as simple as paying close attention to the health of the servers where your application is hosted.

We are back with a simplified configuration for another critical open-source component, Zookeeper. Monitoring Zookeeper applications helps to ensure that the data sets are distributed as expected across the cluster. Although Zookeeper is considered to be very resilient to network mishaps, monitoring is inevitable. To do so, we’ll set up monitoring using the Zookeeper receiver from OpenTelemetry.