Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The OTLPMetricsWriter is a new Icinga 2 feature available since v2.16 that exports check plugin performance data as OpenTelemetry-compliant metrics via the OTLP HTTP protocol. With a single configuration object, it connects Icinga 2 to any OTLP-compatible backend like Prometheus, Grafana Mimir, Datadog, Elasticsearch, VictoriaMetrics, and more.

The way you write code is changing, which means the way you observe your systems and respond to issues needs to change, too. Engineers today spend much of their day working via command line, as agentic tools like Cursor and Claude Code have become highly effective at handling many day-to-day engineering tasks. This greatly accelerates code generation, but it doesn't solve for the context switching that comes when you have to jump into another tool that's not part of this new, faster workflow.

To simulate real user behavior, performance tests often rely on API keys, tokens, or credentials to interact with real systems. But as your testing suite grows, this sensitive data can start to sprawl across scripts, configs, and environments, increasing the risk of exposure and making tests harder to manage and maintain. To address this challenge, we’re rolling out secrets management for Grafana Cloud k6, the fully managed performance testing platform powered by k6 OSS.

Guest blog by Florent Goutailler, Associate Professor, Télécom Saint-Etienne, France Teaching real-time embedded systems has always involved a fundamental challenge: the most critical behaviors – task scheduling, timing, and concurrency – are largely invisible at runtime. When students begin working with a real-time operating system such as FreeRTOS, they are introduced to concepts like scheduling, task prioritization, semaphores, and inter-task communication.

If distributed architectures have altered how systems degrade, then the way organizations model operational must evolve accordingly. Threshold monitoring evaluates individual metrics. Correlation clusters related alerts. Neither, on its own, explains how instability in one component alters exposure across an interconnected service landscape. In conversations at Nexus Live 2025, ScienceLogic’s annual customer conference, leaders described this distinction with clarity.

If you’re already running or are familiar with Home Assistant, you’ve likely worked with integrations, maybe a few automations, and possibly MQTT as a way to wire devices together. But webhooks add another layer of flexibility that lets you level up your smart home into a fully-customized, intelligent network. Instead of relying on built-in integrations and being confined to the same local network, you can let external devices and services push events directly into Home Assistant.

When my Sidekiq job starts failing or slowing down, I often feel frustrated, especially if I don’t know how to fix it. If you’re using Sidekiq to run your background jobs, you know what I’m talking about. It’s a vital element of your stack, handling everything from data exports to password reset requests. It runs silently in the background, and most of the time, you’re not even giving it a second thought.

Automated Diagnostics & Remediation reduces MTTR by closing the gap between detection, diagnosis, and resolution.