Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Software systems are getting better at understanding themselves. The mix of richer telemetry, smarter pipelines, and agentic AI is shifting observability from a passive record of events into something more active and useful. That shift is what we mean by context engineering. We recently partnered with O’Reilly on a report by David Beale that introduces the discipline. Before you read it, here are five things worth knowing.

We’re delighted to share that Grafana Labs has been named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Observability Platforms for the third consecutive year. Notably, we’re also positioned furthest in “Completeness of Vision” for the second year in a row.

You run . Nothing is broken yet, but nothing will proceed either until the lock is cleared. This guide covers what actually does, when it is safe to use, how to find the lock ID on every major backend, and what to do if the command itself does not fix things.

We are thrilled to announce that Datadog has been named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Observability Platforms, for the sixth consecutive year. We believe this recognition reflects our continued focus on helping customers observe, secure, and act on everything that matters across their technology stack. Datadog was positioned highest in Ability to Execute in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Observability Platforms.

We recently wrapped up a large-scale, multi-month Kafka migration project. We used to run self-hosted Confluent Platform and ZooKeeper as clusters of AWS EC2 instances, and now all of our Kafka clusters run open-source Apache Kafka 4.1.1 running in KRaft mode and deployed to AWS EKS.

Your status page is a bridge to your customers. It’s where you show what you can do and prove that your product is more than just sales talk. Though easy to overlook, it provides an opportunity to showcase all that’s best about your services. The trick is how to do it well. Fortunately, there are many outstanding status pages that you can draw inspiration from. Once your ideas take shape, you're ready to present your vision to customers.

If you’ve copied the same icon font or the same LESS helper into two or three Icinga Web modules, you’ve hit the problem libraries exist to solve. This guide builds one from scratch: a small, self-contained icon and font pack that any number of modules can share, with no copy-pasting and no per-module registration step.

A full outage is the easy version of this job. Something goes down, someone notices immediately, you fix it, and you move on. Everyone understands that problem, including the users complaining about it. Intermittent network connectivity issues are a different animal. Your network connection works, then it doesn't, then it does again, all on its own, usually before you've had a chance to open a single tool. By the time you sit down to look, the network is behaving perfectly.