Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Server monitoring is essential for organisations relying on digital infrastructure. It tracks performance, availability, and health to ensure smooth operations. Without it, businesses face risks like downtime, poor performance, and security threats.

If you're running workloads in AWS, you've probably heard about VPC Flow Logs. These logs are your eyes and ears for network traffic in your Virtual Private Cloud, and knowing how to check them properly can save you hours of troubleshooting headaches. Whether you're tracking down connectivity issues or monitoring for suspicious activity, this guide will walk you through checking VPC flow logs step by step, with practical examples you can apply today.

Logs can provide vital insights to help you monitor system health, pinpoint and resolve issues, and improve cybersecurity. They capture real-time errors and record information about events and other system activities, shedding light on everything from application performance to security threats. However, managing logs can be overwhelming. To get the most out of your logs, you need to aggregate them into a centralized system where they can be organized, searched, and analyzed effectively.

Organizations today are grappling with an explosion of telemetry data growth as cloud adoption accelerates, digital infrastructures expands, and operational complexity increases. More data creates more challenges for IT and security teams as they struggle to separate signal from noise while maintaining compliance and efficiency within constrained budgets. It often feels like being caught in the deep end of a wave pool without a floatie, with each new data source sending another wave crashing down.

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.

Setting up proper logging is like having a good navigation system when you're driving through unfamiliar territory. For DevOps engineers and SREs managing Java applications, understanding how to configure the built-in java.util.logging framework is essential knowledge that can save you hours of troubleshooting headaches. Let's break down java util logging configuration in a way that makes sense — no fancy jargon, we promise!

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.