When discussing observability, the “big 3” - logs, metrics, and traces, always get mentioned. But for some, more data doesn’t always mean better. Our lead engineer, JJ, had some advice to share about how logs may not be necessary for everyone. Simplifying your observability stack isn’t difficult - you just need to be intentional with implementation. Check out more MetricFire blog posts below, and our hosted Graphite service! Get a free trial and start using MetricFire now!

If you're looking for a straightforward way to collect NGINX metrics via OpenTelemetry and send them to your Graphite-based monitoring setup, this article is for you! With minimal configuration you’ll be collecting key metrics from your NGINX connections within minutes. In this article, we'll explain how to install the OpenTelemetry Collector, and easily configure it to receive and export NGINX metrics to a Hosted Carbon endpoint.

Looking for a straightforward way to collect NGINX metrics with OpenTelemetry and send them to your Graphite-based monitoring setup? Unlike Prometheus, which requires configuring scrape jobs and query language nuances, Carbon/Graphite offers a simpler setup with minimal overhead—just send metrics as plain text and query them easily with familiar tools like Grafana. Whether you're setting up dashboards, alerts, or just keeping an eye on traffic, this guide will get you actionable insights in no time!

Server monitoring is crucial to learn these days to use your servers efficiently. It helps optimize the performance of a server and diagnose issues productively. One useful tool used these days is Graphite, which helps monitor a server’s performance and provides graphing solutions by gaining valuable insights into your server. You can explore MetricFire’s Hosted Graphite service today by signing up for a free trial or booking a demo session.

If you're already using OpenTelemetry for tracing and logs, adding otelcol-contrib as an agent for system metrics just makes sense. It keeps everything in the same pipeline, so you’re not juggling multiple monitoring tools or dealing with inconsistent data formats. Plus, with built-in support for host metrics, custom processing, and direct exports to Graphite, it’s a solid way to ship performance data without extra overhead.

We’ve supported syncing your metrics from Kinesis Streams, Amazon’s streaming data platform, for several years. Kinesis Streams helps you gather and process streaming data which can then be monitored in your Hosted Graphite account. Recently, we’ve added support for Firehose, a fully managed and scalable service that allows users to stream data to destinations like Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Redshift, or Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES).

It has been said that software engineers are organisms that convert caffeine into code. Not all software engineers need coffee to get by, but it's popular enough that it'd be silly for us not to have an office coffee machine... …it'd also be sort of silly for a monitoring company not to monitor that coffee machine, which is so crucial that we could make a reasonable argument for it being part of the production infrastructure.

PostgreSQL is a beast when it comes to handling data, but if you're running an instance that needs to be accessed remotely, securing it with SSL is non-negotiable. Without SSL, your database connection is essentially an open book for anyone snooping on the network. Let’s lock it down with properly signed certificates!

So, you’ve got a PostgreSQL database packed with juicy data, and you want to turn those raw numbers into slick, interactive Grafana dashboards? Good call! Grafana’s PostgreSQL datasource is like the secret handshake that lets you visualize your data in style—no extra ETL magic required. In this guide, we’ll walk through getting PostgreSQL and Grafana to play nice, covering everything from connection settings to query tuning.

Today, server uptime is crucial for maintaining business operations and user satisfaction. Monitoring your servers enable you to proactively solve problems rather than fight fires as they come up. This article will show you how you can monitor your servers manually and automatically using MetricFire.