These days, systems and applications evolve at a rapid pace. This makes analyzing the internal performance of applications complex. Observability emerges as a path to efficient and effective operational insights. Imagine a team of doctors monitoring a patient’s vitals—heart rate, temperature, blood pressure. These readings, combined with observation of symptoms, paint a picture of the patient’s health. This allows doctors to diagnose issues and provide care.

When Google Cloud welcomed StackState to offer our full-stack observability solution to their network of customers, we were thrilled. Our excitement only grew when Google invited us to join other partners this week at Google Cloud Next ’24 at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas.

This article touches on how we at Birdie handled our transition from logs towards using OpenTelemetry as the primary mechanism for achieving world-class observability of our systems.

Three different businesses, one shared problem: SailPoint, Kushki, and Flexcity were all looking for a hosted solution to help them optimize their telemetry storage, gain more insights from their observability strategy, and keep costs manageable. But what they gained from migrating to Grafana Cloud and working with Grafana Labs was much more. “The engineering team is super sharp. They’re experts. This is the best of the best," said Omar Lopez, head of the observability team from SailPoint.

Many often wonder, “Is there a difference between observability and monitoring?” The thing is as IT environments have become more complex, monitoring alone has become increasingly less effective. That’s because while monitoring is crucial, it isn’t particularly suited to tracking unforeseen or unexpected turns of events. That’s what observability is meant for. This guide will clarify what observability and monitoring are – and how they differ.

Node.js was introduced over 20 years ago and remains a popular choice for web application teams with over 30 million users. Sites such as Netflix, PayPal, and Uber continue to rely on Node.js to build and maintain their applications.

Today at Google Next, Charity Majors demonstrated how to use Honeycomb to find unexpected problems in our generative AI integration. Software components that integrate with AI products like Google’s Gemini are powerful in their ability to surprise us. Nondeterministic behavior means there is no such thing as “fully tested.” Never has there been more of a need for testing in production!