Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

TLS 1.2 isn't end of life, but it will be soon

You’re probably running a TLS configuration that the IETF says is “non-conformant”. But you didn’t do anything wrong. In July, the IETF published a pair of RFCs that took away three of TLS 1.2’s key exchange methods and froze the rest of it. The phrase they used is MUST NOT, the strongest thing a specification is allowed to say. Nginx, Apache, and Windows Server all ship with those key exchanges turned on by default. Nothing breaks tomorrow.

How to Monitor Docker Containers You Cannot Rebuild or Redeploy

How long would it take you to get one new line of code into the container running your payment service? In a lot of organizations, the answer runs to weeks, because the change has to clear a build owner, a test cycle, and a release window that nobody wants to open early. That timeline is why so much monitoring advice fails on contact. Most of it opens by telling you to add a library, rebuild the image, and push a new version. If you could do that this afternoon, you would have done it already.

The Most Expensive Service Call Is the Second One, Yet Most Field Service Organizations Normalize It

A second service call rarely looks like a strategic failure on a dashboard. It appears as another work order, another technician assignment, or another customer follow-up. That accounting view makes repeat visits look operationally normal, even when they are financially destructive. The first visit carries the visible cost of dispatch, labor, travel time, and parts handling. The second visit carries all of that again, plus customer downtime, SLA pressure, escalation risk, and lost technician capacity.

Starlette Is Adding Native OpenTelemetry Tracing. Here's What That Means for Your APM.

If you run Starlette or FastAPI in production with an APM tool, you should keep an eye on PR. It adds native OpenTelemetry HTTP server spans directly into the framework. No external instrumentor, no monkeypatching. Just spans emitted from the router itself. At Scout Monitoring, we instrument Starlette and FastAPI through our Python agent. A change like this touches how every APM tool in the Python ecosystem works with these frameworks, ours included.

AI Was Supposed to Mean Working Less. For Some Developers, It's Doing the Opposite.

AI coding tools were supposed to mean developers work less. On a recent webinar recorded with LeadDev, senior engineering manager Vernon put words to something a lot of teams are quietly noticing instead: “It’s concerning because it’s the opposite of what was promised. We were supposed to be working less.”

Making Machine Data Easier to Onboard, Prepare and Trust with AI-Powered Data Management

Every investigation, detection, dashboard, and AI-assisted workflow depends on one thing: data that teams can trust. But as environments grow more distributed, the data behind those experiences gets harder to manage. New applications, cloud services, security tools, infrastructure, and network devices constantly generate machine data, and each new source can introduce new formats, missing fields, inconsistent mappings, and pipeline changes that require expert attention.

What AI compresses, and What it Amplifies

Adam Berman, VP of Engineering at Semgrep, on the double edge of AI tools for engineering leaders: they compress the distance between an idea and a working prototype, letting him get from exploration to a demoable POC in the gaps between meetings. But that same leverage amplifies risk. One person can spin up 1,000 unowned problems just as fast as they can spin up 1,000 wins. From a Braintrust by Cortex conversation on how AI is changing the job of engineering leadership.

What is a Tier 1 IP backbone, and why does it matter?

Every time you join a video meeting, move data between cloud environments or use an AI-powered application, your traffic travels across a complex network of interconnected infrastructure. At the heart of this global ecosystem sits the internet backbone – and the highest-performing networks within it are known as Tier 1 IP backbones.

Why You Shouldn't Vibe Code Your Monitoring Tool

Vibe coding made building software feel almost too accessible. You describe what you want, an AI assistant scaffolds it, and a few hours later, something is running. So, it was only a matter of time before developers started asking the obvious question: why should I pay for a monitoring tool when I can just build my own? In all fairness, the DIY instinct is a healthy one. But monitoring is one of the last corners you’d want to cut.

Trace AWS Lambda durable functions with Datadog

AWS Lambda durable functions let you build long-running, multi-step workflows for use cases such as payment processing, order fulfillment, and AI workflows with human approval. A single durable execution can pause for a wait or callback, retry failed work, and resume in a fresh Lambda invocation without losing its state. The strong resilience provided by durable executions, however, creates an observability challenge because each invocation produces its own telemetry data.