Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

7 Best IT Support Companies in Birmingham Reviewed 2026

If you run a business, you already know how quickly things fall apart when your IT starts playing up. One minute everything is running fine, then suddenly emails stop working, systems slow to a crawl, or somebody clicks on something they definitely shouldn't have clicked on. Most businesses don't really think about IT support until something goes wrong, which is usually when the panic starts. The problem is there are loads of IT support companies out there now, and a lot of them sound exactly the same. Every website promises "tailored solutions" and "cutting edge support" without really explaining what makes them different.

Error Budget in SRE: The Complete Guide (2026)

An error budget is the acceptable amount of unreliability permitted by your SLO over a defined time window. It is not a target. It is not a stretch goal. It is a hard ceiling that, when breached, should trigger a pre-agreed organizational response — feature freezes, postmortems, or infrastructure investment. The formula is blunt: Error Budget = 1 - SLO Target Error Budget (time) = (1 - SLO Target) × Window Duration For a 30-day window: That last number should make you uncomfortable.

How Airbnb Built a High-Volume Metrics Pipeline with OpenTelemetry and vmagent

We always knew that Airbnb’s engineering is operating on a completely different scale, and their new high-volume metrics pipeline is proof of that. This is one of those rare stories where scale and efficiency go hand in hand - they modernized their observability stack with open source components and reduced cost by an order of magnitude. Airbnb is now processing more than 100 million samples per second on a single production cluster.

Building a CloudWatch metrics pipeline: parsing OpenTelemetry data

AWS delivers CloudWatch metrics in OpenTelemetry format via Firehose, but AppSignal uses its own internal format. Building the parser to bridge these two formats presented several technical challenges. The metrics arriving through this pipe power AWS automated dashboards. When AppSignal detects metrics from a supported AWS service, it creates a dashboard for it automatically, with pre-built charts grouped by category: compute, databases, networking, messaging, storage, and others.

From Signal Corps to Space: Building Networks That Can't Fail with Troy MacDonald

What does it take to succeed in networking when complexity is constantly increasing, and change never slows down? In this episode of Next-Gen Network Heroes, host Bob Slevin sits down with Troy (David) MacDonald, a network engineer at Blue Origin and former U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer, to explore a career that spans from infantry beginnings to designing and managing large-scale, mission-critical networks.

Optimizing Team Strengths for Effective Operations

Most people think great network engineers are defined by technical expertise. This episode challenges that idea. Because what Troy McDonald shows is that the real differentiator isn’t just technical skill—it’s the ability to translate complexity into clarity. From military operations to enterprise networks, one lesson keeps showing up.