Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Sometimes your API call takes a few seconds longer than expected. Or users start reporting slow page loads. One of the most common reasons? Network latency.

If your users are spread across the globe but your servers are sitting in Virginia, you’ll probably hear complaints about slow load times, especially from places like Australia. CDNs fix this by caching static assets closer to where your users are. Azure CDN does exactly that, and it fits well if you're already using Azure services. You can hook it up to Blob Storage, App Services, or your origin. This guide covers how to set it up, what to expect, and how to know it’s working.

Your code passes locally, CI is green, and the deploy goes through. Then production throws a 500, and the trace isn’t helpful. And here, event logs help. A log captures timestamped records of what the app did HTTP requests, DB queries, cache misses, retries, failures. These entries give you enough context to debug without reproducing the issue locally. Especially when dealing with distributed systems, logs are often the only consistent source of truth.

Collecting logs in Kubernetes often starts as a simple goal, and quickly turns into a game of “where did that log line go?” Between sidecars, DaemonSets, and countless config options, it’s easy to get lost. Fluent Bit helps cut through the noise. It's fast, lightweight, and plays well with Kubernetes. And when you deploy it using Helm charts? The setup becomes way more manageable. This guide covers the how and the why, without overcomplicating the what.

Code in production will break. Maybe a request takes too long, maybe it fails quietly, or maybe it works fine one minute and falls over the next. Logs can help, sure—but they don’t always show the full picture, especially when performance issues are involved. Elastic APM gives you a clearer view. It traces what your application is doing from incoming requests to database queries and everything in between.

Your Kafka producer pushed a million messages yesterday. Nice. But can you tell if they all made it? Or why did latency spike at 2 PM? Producer metrics help you determine that. They expose how long messages take to send, whether messages are getting stuck, and whether retries are piling up. Let’s go over which ones help while debugging and how to monitor them.

Getting paged pulls engineers away from meaningful work, yet incident response in many organizations remains manual, reactive, and draining. An alert fires and teams scramble to find the root cause, relying on siloed knowledge, incomplete context, and a few on-call experts who are already stretched thin. The rise of AI coding agents has only intensified this challenge: As teams ship code faster with less human oversight, production systems grow increasingly complex and harder to understand.

Pulling observability data together is rarely clean. Metrics come from everywhere, formats vary, and making sense of it takes some work. OpenTelemetry Collector and Prometheus fit perfectly here. The Collector handles ingestion and processing from different sources, while Prometheus stores and queries the data. Simple, effective, and no vendor lock-in. In this blog, we cover how to integrate the Collector with Prometheus, common pitfalls, and ways to control costs.

Linux log files are text-based records that capture system events, application activities, and user actions. They're stored primarily in the /var/log directory and provide essential information for debugging issues, monitoring system health, and maintaining security. This guide covers the most important Linux log files and a few detailed techniques for reading and analyzing them.

Prometheus can be lightweight to start with, but once it’s in production, storage usage tends to grow faster than expected. Managing how long data is kept becomes critical, especially when you're working with limited disk space or tight budgets. This guide outlines the key concepts behind Prometheus data retention, how to configure it effectively, and what to watch out for.