As we at Splunk accelerate our cloud journey, we’re often faced with the decision of when to use logs vs metrics — a decision many in IT face. On the surface, one can do a lot by just observing logs and events. In fact, in the early days of Splunk Cloud, this is exactly how we observed everything. As we continue to grow, however, we find ourselves using a combination of both. This post lays out the overall difference in logs and metrics and when to best utilize each.

Prometheus is a widely utilized time-series database for monitoring the health and performance of AWS infrastructure. With its ecosystem of data collection, storage, alerting, and analysis capabilities, among others, the open source tool set offers a complete package of monitoring solutions. Prometheus is ideal for scraping metrics from cloud-native services, storing the data for analysis, and monitoring the data with alerts.

Find out how to effectively and easily monitor and troubleshoot MongoDB using Netdata.

A lot of site owners underestimate the consequences of downtime, assuming that a brief outage won’t do much harm to their business. But this can leave them with broken web pages that are either poorly rendered or filled with bugs, frustrating users into hitting the “back” button since they can’t navigate the site. The truth is, keeping outages at bay beats fixing them after the fact, even with a guaranteed backup plan.

Oracle is a highly performant and reliable multi-model database management system running online transaction processing, data warehousing, and mixed database workloads. Although Oracle environments are reliable and performant, monitoring dedicated Oracle on-premise or cloud deployments is crucial to safeguard business continuity.

Sensu offers a complete solution for infrastructure monitoring and observability, designed to give you visibility into all of your important infrastructure components, including containers, applications, traditional server closets, and the cloud. Sensu Go is a commercial product based on an open source core that is freely available under a permissive MIT License and publicly available on GitHub.