Let’s face it: managing IT operations today feels a bit like spinning plates in a hurricane. Alerts are pinging, systems are stalling, users are shouting (as if that’ll help), and all the while, you’re drowning in a sea of repetitive, manual tasks. Sound familiar? Welcome to the wonderfully chaotic world of IT. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

During critical incidents, teams often scramble to pull data from multiple sources, wasting precious time and delaying issue resolution. Manual processes hamper response and create blind spots that can lead to costly oversights. Data integration addresses this head-on. Data integration collects incident management information from various sources, such as monitoring tools, logs, and user reports, into a unified system.

Maximize your observability with tracing tools to track requests, identify bottlenecks, and optimize system performance across services.

Proactive monitoring helps IT teams spot issues early, ensuring smooth operations, minimal disruptions, and a better user experience.

Demystifying Docker logs: From basic tail commands to advanced log management, learn how to debug and monitor containers in production.

Recently, I have seen a trend of enterprises moving toward OpenTelemetry (OTel) for application tracing. Tail sampling, in particular, has emerged as a preferred approach to gain actionable insights while balancing data volume and cost. OpenTelemetry offers developers and practitioners the ability to instrument their code with open-source tools, moving away from vendor-provided tools for application instrumentation.

Lessons from the front lines: Moving to observability maturity What separates the observability experts from the novices? It's a question that's been on my mind lately, especially after diving into our recent 2024 State of Observability Survey of over 500 practitioners. In my past roles as a DevOps engineer and a site reliability engineer (SRE), I've seen firsthand how a mature observability practice can be the difference between sleepless nights and smooth sailing.

In the world of security, being able to use system telemetry of Windows hosts opens new possibilities for monitoring, troubleshooting, and securing IT environments. Recognizing this, Elastic has introduced new capabilities focused on Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) — a powerful Windows-native mechanism for capturing a vast array of system and application events. With these new additions, Elastic users can capture, analyze, and visualize Windows telemetry using the Elastic Search AI Platform.

How has AI shaped ITSM? We analysed 8 leading ITSM vendors to find out how they implemented AI in their solutions.

In a Kafka setup, high availability isn’t just nice to have—it’s a lifeline. Downtime, data loss, or hiccups in message flow can make or break critical applications. Let’s be real: setting up Kafka brokers to be resilient takes some fine-tuning, but it’s absolutely worth it. Imagine dealing with failovers smoothly or knowing your data is protected even if a broker goes down—this is what configuring for resilience is all about.