Every single app — large or small, open source or not — has room for improvement when it comes to performance. This is why we created Skylight for Open Source to give open source contributors the tools they need to find these issues. Over the next week, we'll show you three different open source apps running on Skylight, each with their own unique performance challenges, varying in complexity.

Having worked closely with software developers for almost a decade, I’ve noticed some common traits amongst them. Technically minded people think about problems in different ways. I’m often stunned how I could miss such an obvious data point or edge case when discussing product changes with people who have a far greater technical mind than myself.

For as long as I can remember, I have loved building businesses. Ideas have always come naturally to me, and over the years I have honed my skills at actually making those ideas a reality. I recall one of my first businesses at about 12 or 13 years old, designing nicer looking versions of property data sheets for real estate agents to give out to prospective buyers. My most recent profitable business is StatusGator, a status page monitoring and alerting service.

Opinions vary in recent online discussions regarding systems and software observability. Some state that observability is a replacement for monitoring. Others that they are parallel mechanisms, or that one is a subset of another (not to mention where tracing fits into such a hierarchy). Monitoring Weekly recently provided a helpful list of resources for an overview of this discussion, as well as some practical applications of observability.

Your virtual machine shares resources with other virtual machines on a hypervisor (the server that is hosting the virtual machines). CPU Steal is the amount of time your virtual CPU has to wait for a real CPU from the hypervisor. This happens when a neighbour VM is using up all the real CPU of the hypervisor. CPU Steal is an important metric to monitor in case you're using virtualized servers. It can have significant impact on the performance of your machine.

One of the cornerstones of a successful business in today’s digital environment is ensuring that web application performance is user-friendly and runs smoothly. A well-oiled website and its applications represent the face of a company, and in an ideal scenario, they serve as a mark of reliability, innovation, and progress.

Heard of the prebuilt integration between Icinga and AlertOps? Icinga is an open source computer system and network monitoring application that is critical for your business.