Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The latest News and Information on Monitoring for Websites, Applications, APIs, Infrastructure, and other technologies.

Getting Your Clouds Under Control: Part 1-FinOps

Given the strategic importance of the cloud and size of cloud expenditures, it’s critical for enterprises to have solid controls in place to manage it all. According to our latest research, however, while most organizations agree with that sentiment, very few have put it into practice. There are distinct but related disciplines that come into play: FinOps and cloud governance. In this two-part series, we explore current state of each.

Solving slow web applications - Kentik Synthetics Page Load Test

Kentik's Phil Gervasi talks with Product Manager Sunil Kodiyan to discuss what synthetic testing is and how it can be used to troubleshoot issues with web applications. Sunil demonstrates the use of the Kentik Synthetics Page Load test, which provides a granular breakdown of how every component on the page is loading. Using that information, web app developers can easily track down exactly what’s impacting a site’s performance—whether it’s a site hosted on-premises, in the cloud, or by a SaaS provider.

Multi-Step Monitoring: Why it's Essential and How it Works

The term “essential” is thrown around pretty loosely these days. That new show about the hospital (no, not that one… not that one either… yeah that one) is advertised as essential viewing. A newly-released track by a hip hop artist that describes how little they need to release new tracks in order to live much, much better than the rest of us? That’s essential listening.

Grafana dashboards: A complete guide to all the different types you can build

There is one universal truth about using Grafana: Dashboards are easy to create, but not-so-easy to organize. As organizations scale, there’s a high risk of unchecked dashboard sprawl, when dashboards become an unmanageable mess. As the number of users increase, so does their dashboard output. Our guide to dashboard management gives an overview of features that help with organizing dashboards, but there are still two pain points.

Ask Miss O11y: As a developer, how can I try out observability?

What's the first small thing to do in o11y that would teach me something, bring something valuable, and open the way for something else? Observability doesn’t have to be a big, company-wide project. It can be useful locally and individually. A little playing around can get you some crucial insight into how your software works. Try it as a team, or in a pair, or by yourself. It takes 3 steps: Step 1 is easy. The other two might take ten minutes, or maybe more like a day.

Building Efficient Pipelines in Cribl Stream

An old colleague of mine once said to me, “It doesn’t matter how inefficiently something DOESN’T work.” This was a joke used to make a point, so it stuck with me. It also made me consider that it does matter how efficiently something DOES work. Sometimes, when we have tools like Cribl Stream making things like routing, reducing, and transforming data so easy, we can forget that there might be a more efficient way to do it.

Build or Buy? Developer Productivity vs. Flexibility

A common debate in software development focuses on whether to use already-available tools or services, which offer better developer productivity, or stick with lower-level tools or custom-built solutions, which offer more control and potentially better performance and flexibility. This can be boiled down to the decision of whether to build or buy. These two approaches are at the root of many current tech industry ideological conflicts.

Expanding Vision: OpenSearch Dashboards Advance Open Source Observability

From the moment Elastic announced plans to abandon a pure open source license for its Elasticsearch engine and Kibana dashboards in early 2021, there’s been a massive effort underway to create clear alternatives for the global community of active users. Logz.io has been an outspoken advocate and contributor to this work – fully embracing it as part of our product roadmap to best serve the needs of our customers, and preserve our long-term commitment to open source observability.

Express middleware: A complete guide

In this guide, we’ll explore the basics of using Express.js middleware. We’ll create a simple Express API from scratch, then add the middleware to it and demonstrate how to use each tool. The Express middleware tools we’re going to discuss are must-haves for your initial Express.js app setup. We’ll show you how to get started with them, and you can further configure them according to your application’s unique needs.