Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Summary InfluxDB 3.11 delivers major performance and data management updates for growing time series workloads, with significantly faster queries on recent data, expanded support for wide and ultra-sparse schemas, and a more predictable resource profile under load. InfluxDB 3 Enterprise also adds backup and restore, bulk Parquet import, row-level deletes, and a built-in Explorer UI.

Enterprise networks have outgrown the flat, predictable topologies they were built on. Traffic now crosses on-premises data centers, multiple public clouds, SD-WAN links, and the home connections of a distributed workforce. When any one of those segments degrades, the business feels it as slow applications, failed transactions, and frustrated users — long before anyone confirms the network is the cause.

Observing fast-growing agentic workloads is no small feat, especially if you try to build your own monitoring stack or rely solely on tools built for a time before LLMs. At Grafana Labs, we know this all too well.

Summer is the perfect time to step back from the alert stream and revisit the ideas your whole monitoring practice quietly rests on. Not the newest tool or the shiniest dashboard — the fundamentals: what to measure, how to read it, when to wake someone up, and what to do when something breaks at 2 a.m. We packed six of those fundamentals into a free, no-signup PDF — The DevOps & Monitoring Summer Workbook, complete with hands-on exercises and an answer key.

Does the anomaly you need to catch show up in infrastructure, in security logs, in a data pipeline, or in a revenue figure? If you already know the answer, you probably learned it from an incident. A service degraded quietly, nobody got paged, and the post-mortem showed the signal had been in the data for hours. The thresholds were set correctly, and they still could not separate a busy Tuesday from a failure.

At AppSignal, we love talking to our customers to learn how they're using the product. Recently, one of them showed us something worth sharing: with a single chat prompt, his AI agent searches production logs, closes incidents, and checks whether a pull request has shipped. Automating that kind of work turned out to be a matter of building the right agent skill.

MCP servers have a reputation: they eat your context window. CLIs paired with skills, on the other hand, are more token efficient. But is this still true? I dropped all my MCP servers five months ago. Five months is a long time in AI land. When Anthropic came up with the concept of skills, many people stopped using MCP servers in favor of CLI tooling and skills.