Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

AWS CloudWatch is a widely used observability tool that comes built into AWS. It provides easy access to logs, metrics, and alarms, making it a convenient choice for teams monitoring AWS workloads. But while CloudWatch offers a lot of power, many teams unknowingly misconfigure or misuse it, leading to unexpected costs, limited visibility, and operational challenges. Here are some common pitfalls we see—and how to avoid them.

Keeping track of your infrastructure is non-negotiable. Prometheus makes that easier by collecting metrics and alerting you when something’s off. It’s a powerful tool that helps you understand what’s happening under the hood, whether you’re running a small cluster or managing large-scale applications. In this guide, we’ll break down Prometheus functions—what they do, how they work, and why they matter for better observability. Let’s get into it.

Some websites load in a snap, while others make you wonder if the internet is broken. The difference? Often, it comes down to how (and where) their content is served. A Content Delivery Network (CDN) helps by storing copies of your content in multiple locations worldwide, so users don’t have to wait for a distant server to respond. If you're on AWS, CloudFront is the built-in way to do this—helping speed things up while also handling security and traffic optimization.

Choosing between OpenTelemetry and Datadog isn't just another tool decision. It's about how you'll monitor your systems, troubleshoot issues, and ultimately keep your services running smoothly. If you've been tasked with figuring out which route to take, you're in the right place. Let's get started!

If you are part of an engineering team, monitoring the performance of your CI/CD pipelines is a high priority. With the SquaredUp GitHub plugin you can view key metrics for your GitHub repos and workflows all within a single pane of glass. We also have plugins for Jira, Circle CI, Azure DevOps and more. So even if you are using many different tools you can still get an end to end view of your processes.

Andrew Dedesko is a backend software engineer with 13 years of experience. He became very interested in metrics and alerting after being woken up countless nights while on call. Outside of work, Andrew likes cycling, camping, making s’mores, and pancakes. Adriano Mariani is a software engineer with three years of experience specializing in backend software development. Currently, Adriano is working at Kijiji on SEO-related initiatives.

Keeping your servers online is always important for the health of your business and keeping users happy. Essentially, if you are keeping an eye on your servers, you can proactively fix problems before they blow up rather than fighting them as they arise. Setting all this up can be a breeze or a bit of a headache, depending on your servers, what metrics you're tracking, and your expertise. Either way, MetricFire’s got your back!

Ruby and Rails are great tools that allow you to create complex web applications quickly. Well, some kinds of complex web applications. While they excel at traditional, monolithic, server-rendered applications, they fail to excel at delivering real-time or distributed services. This is why it's so handy for Rubyists to learn a programming language like Go. Go is designed to write lightweight services that handle lots of inbound connections.

We are happy to announce our latest project at MetricFire: a brand-new CLI tool! Get ready to start monitoring your systems in one step - no need to modify any configuration files manually. Just run a terminal command, follow the prompts, and forward your system metrics to Hosted Graphite in minutes. In this article, we’ll share an overview of the Hosted Graphite CLI, why we’re making it, and how we’re making it.