Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Bus Factor is a measure of risk to a project or organization due to the loss of key personnel. For software engineering teams, a low bus factor (meaning only a few people hold critical knowledge or skills) can lead to complications that result in product failures.

Encryption is a fundamental part of nearly every modern application, whether you’re storing data, sending data to customers, or sharing data between backend services. Most organizations have a data encryption strategy, and nearly every web page is using HTTPS, thanks to initiatives like Let’s Encrypt. But setting up encryption isn’t a one-time initiative. Over time, the certificates backing modern encryption expire and need to be replaced.

IT modernization is imperative to an agile, productive, citizen-centric, and cost-efficient government. It’s also codified as a key objective of many mandates and guidelines. But as mission-critical as IT modernization initiatives are, they are also fraught with risk and operational challenges, including: To overcome these barriers to streamlined IT operations, government leaders should rely on artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps).

Traditional monitoring has become insufficient for managing complex systems. Modern infrastructures consist of numerous interconnected services, and simply monitoring individual metrics and logs fails to provide a comprehensive view. This is where observability becomes crucial.

With the advent of byte code instrumentation (BCI) in 2008, application performance management took a giant leap in what is known as "inside-out monitoring," that is, monitoring from inside the application. Before that, application monitoring was largely limited to tracking CPU, memory, disk, and process availability. BCI offered new opportunities in terms of how applications could be monitored and what could be monitored from an application performance perspective.

One critical decision businesses face today n is whether to choose on-premise software or a cloud-based solution. On-premise software, which is installed and run on your own hardware infrastructure, provides a level of control and customization that many businesses find essential. However, it's important to weigh this against the potential costs and maintenance demands.

We consistently roll out helpful updates and fun features in Grafana Cloud, our fully managed observability platform powered by the open source Grafana LGTM Stack (Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics). In case you missed it, here’s a roundup of the latest and greatest updates for Grafana Cloud this month. You can also read about all the features we add to Grafana Cloud in our What’s New in Grafana Cloud documentation.