Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Grafana Alloy, our distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector with native support for Prometheus, is great for all sorts of needs, including shipping your Microsoft Azure metrics and logs to Grafana Cloud.

OpenTelemetry is officially the second-largest project in the CNCF, only behind Kubernetes. This year we had 13.000 engineers, maintainers, and vendors show up in London.

If you need to monitor your application’s health, troubleshoot issues quickly, and ensure compliance with various security policies, application logging is compulsory. Without proper logging, identifying the root cause of failures, tracking suspicious activity, or optimizing application performance will become significantly more challenging, if not impossible.

Log shippers are essential components in modern infrastructure, serving as the critical connection between the systems that generate logs and the platforms that store and analyze them. They operate behind the scenes to ensure that important system and application information reaches its destination reliably. This guide provides a comprehensive overview of log shippers, including their functionality, implementation considerations, and selection criteria for different environments.

Microsoft Windows Internet Information Services (IIS) log files hold a wealth of data on web application activity and performance. But, locating and managing these logs can be challenging for busy sites with constant traffic and complex infrastructures. IT operations teams rely on IIS logs to troubleshoot web applications, track server requests, identify users, and address other user traffic concerns for optimal security.

Docker containers continuously generate logs during operation, and without proper management, these logs can consume significant disk space, impact system performance, and create operational issues. Logrotate offers an effective solution for managing these logs in containerized environments. This guide covers the implementation of logrotate in Docker containers – from initial setup through advanced configurations that ensure stable, maintainable container deployments.

Instead of deploying a patchwork of proprietary agents for every platform, a telemetry pipeline lets you route your data through a single, consistent layer—and send it to any backend you choose. Flexibility, achieved. But there’s a catch. If your pipeline is proprietary, you’ve only shifted the lock-in left. Sure, you can now add or swap destinations freely—but you’re still deeply dependent on a vendor in the middle of your data flow.

Can you ever get too much data? With modern architectures getting increasingly more complex with hundreds of microservices and containers, data volume grows at an exponential rate, and there’s no pause in sight. In this era of ever-expanding volume of telemetry, it’s nearly impossible to separate valuable data from noise, making things like root cause analysis or alerting needlessly more complicated, while putting pressure on the performance of your stack, your scalability and budget.

Cloudflare is a content delivery network (CDN) that helps businesses accelerate, protect, and optimize their websites, applications, and APIs. It acts as a reverse proxy, sitting between users and a website’s origin server to provide DDoS protection, web application firewall (WAF), CDN caching, and load balancing.