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Comparing Performance and Resource Usage: Grafana Agent vs. Prometheus Agent Mode vs. VictoriaMetrics vmagent

Monitoring and observability are critical components of modern IT infrastructures, enabling organizations to gain insights into the performance, health, and security of their systems. Agents play a crucial role in gathering and forwarding telemetry from various sources to observability platforms.

Considerations for Active Monitoring from an SD-WAN Site

As companies adopt SD-WAN technologies, they increasingly rely on network services outside their control. The new reality is that network operations need end-to-end visibility on the network performance whether or not they own the infrastructure. In a 2023 EMA survey, 63% of companies report using the Internet as their primary WAN connectivity.

The Cool Evolution: Liquid Cooling in Data Centers

The Environmental and Efficiency Benefits of Liquid Cooling Data centers are infamous for their voracious appetite for energy. As the digital universe expands, so does the environmental impact of maintaining these centers. Enter liquid cooling, a technology with the potential to slash energy consumption and reduce the carbon footprint of data centers. Liquid cooling offers superior thermal conductivity compared to air.

Completing the Kubernetes Monitoring Puzzle

Kubernetes has changed the way many organizations approach the deployment of their applications. But despite its benefits, the additional layers of abstraction and reams of data can cause complexity around Kubernetes monitoring. We’ve seen so much of these challenges borne out in the results of the 2024 Observability Pulse survey. In the survey report, 36% of respondents say Kubernetes poses a challenge, and just 10% of organizations say they have full observability into their environments.

Track Errors in FastAPI for Python with AppSignal

When you first try a new library or framework, you are excited about it. However, as soon as you run something on production, things are less than ideal — an error here, an exception there - bugs everywhere! You start reading your logs, but you often lack context, like how often an error happens, in what line, etc. Fortunately, tools such as AppSignal can help. AppSignal helps you track your errors and gives you a lot of valuable insights.

Microsoft SLA for Teams Telephony - 99.999% Uptime Guarantee

This week at Enterprise Connect, Microsoft announced many compelling new Teams features to drive productivity, collaboration and to simplify the lives of its users. One of the most noteworthy announcements is that Microsoft is now delivering a 99.999% Microsoft Teams SLA uptime guarantee for Teams telephony. This covers uptime for calls that take place over the PSTN, including Microsoft Teams Phone, Teams Calling Plans and Audio Conferencing.

AI Explainer: Feature Extraction

In a previous blog post, which was a glossary of terms related to artificial intelligence, I included this brief definition of "feature extraction": Let’s go a bit deeper on that. In the ever-expanding landscape of machine learning, feature extraction stands out as a crucial technique for enhancing the performance of models and uncovering valuable insights from complex datasets.

How to automate image analysis with the ChatGPT vision API and Grafana Cloud Metrics

OpenAI’s ChatGPT has an extraordinary ability to process natural language, reason about a user’s prompts, and generate human-like conversation in response. However, as the saying goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words” — and perhaps an even more significant achievement is ChatGPT’s ability to understand and answer questions about images.

Transforming Human Interaction with Data Using Large Language Models and Generative AI

AI has been on a decades-long journey to revolutionize technology by emulating human intelligence in computers. Recently, AI has extended its influence to areas of practical use with Natural Language Processing and Large Language Models. Today, LLMs enable a natural, simplified, and enhanced way for people to interact with data, the lifeblood of our modern world. In this extensive post, learn the history of LLMs, how they operate, and how they facilitate interaction with information.

New Features to Meet Upcoming Ecommerce Security Regulations

RapidSpike recently launched the first of six new features designed to further boost the security of ecommerce websites, in readiness for PCI DSS 4.0. We recently featured in Prolific North. If you missed the write up, you can catch up in full, here… In response to rising ecommerce threats, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards will impose 63 new requirements on brands processing, storing or transmitting credit card information, with version 4.0 coming into effect on March 31, 2025.