Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Open source is eating the world. Companies have realized and embraced that, and ever more companies today are built around a successful open source project. But there’s also a disturbing counter-movement: vendors relicensing popular open source projects to restrict usage. Last week it was Grafana Labs which announced relicensing Grafana, Loki and Tempo, its popular open source monitoring tools, from Apache2.0 to the more restrictive GNU AGPLv3 license.

Prometheus is an open-source tool that’s meant to monitor and collect metrics from applications. The point of this system is to make it easy for users to see and understand important metrics that let them know how well an application is doing. In fact, Prometheus is able to collect over one million metrics per second, and then store them until you’re ready to retrieve them.

When you hear the word "Thanos," your first thought might be the Marvel Cinematic Universe villain from the Avengers: Infinity War film who seeks to collect the Infinity Stones and end half of all life in the universe. But if you mention the word to a data nerd, you're likely to get a very different response. Prometheus is a free and open-source platform for real-time systems and event monitoring and alerting.

Data provides an essential basis for reports and analytics, with the databases storing the data now driving and informing most custom and line-of-business applications. Thus, anything organizations can do to speed up troubleshooting for database problems is pure gold. In fact, time saved on troubleshooting turns into time organizations can invest in being more productive and profitable.

Indexes play a critical role in SQL Server query performance. SQL Sentry Fragmentation Manager helps you make intelligent decisions about index management based on the table and index information collected. In this blog post, I’m going to discuss index fragmentation, several ways you can identify it, and why a more granular approach to index maintenance can save time and allow you to focus on other tasks during maintenance windows.

Monitoring methodologies evaluate application reachability, availability, performance, and reliability to measure digital experience accurately. Only measuring one or the other will offer a skewed view of the end-user experience. For example, higher availability is not the sole indicator of a good end-user experience. At the same time, reliability is a critical performance indicator for service providers.

One of the great things about SaaS applications is that users in the platform automatically have access to any available software updates. Yet, having a beta program requires a separate environment, creating a potential challenge for users and development teams. In this context, having a tool where you can control features and flag certain users is important because sometimes features are too early or not relevant for all users.

One of the best things about working at InfluxData is getting to know the worldwide InfluxDB community. It’s always fun getting to meet new users through our Community Slack, social media, team members and virtual/in-person events. I recently met David Ko, a DevOps engineer at Index Exchange. Index Exchange is a global marketplace for digital media advertising; I recently chatted with David over Zoom to discuss how they use InfluxDB at Index Exchange.

Nearly all security experts agree that event log data gives you visibility into and documentation over threats facing your environment. Even knowing this, many security professionals don’t have the time to collect, manage, and correlate log data because they don’t have the right solution. The key to security log management is to collect the correct data so your security team can get better alerts to detect, investigate, and respond to threats faster.

LogDNA Alerts are an important vehicle for relaying critical real-time pieces of log data within developer and SRE workflows. From Slack to PagerDuty, these Alert integrations help users understand if something unexpected is happening or simply if their logs need attention. This allows for shorter MTTD (mean time to detection) and improved productivity.