Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

I spend a good amount of my time deploying Aiven services for demos and examples. Traditionally the tools I reach for are: If I’m writing a program, I may also look to the Aiven API, perhaps using curl at the command line or in a shell script, or perhaps with direct HTTP requests in a Python program. The API is how the console and the CLI tool talk to Aiven, but I generally find that too low level to be comfortable, and I always have to look up how to pass in the Aiven user token.

How do you pick the right IT help desk software when every vendor calls itself the best? It comes down to three things. Your team size, your deployment rules, and whether you need full ITSM or plain ticketing. A five-person startup can run support from a shared inbox. A 200-person IT team cannot. Add asset tracking, SLAs, and change control, and that inbox falls apart. The right IT support software routes tickets on its own, links every request to the asset behind it, and shows you where time goes.

Standard BGP can be slow to react. See how BFD and BGP Add-Path help improve uptime and path diversity on MegaIX. When peering on a public Internet Exchange (IX), standard BGP behavior can introduce delays during topology changes. But if you use MegaIX, there are workarounds. In this blog, we explain two lesser-used features available on MegaIX which maximize uptime and path diversity: Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) and BGP Add-Path.

After more than a decade of "cloud-first" strategies, a major counter-trend is reshaping enterprise IT: the systematic repatriation of workloads, data, and infrastructure back to on-premises and private data centers.

Organizations today invest heavily in discovery tools, expecting that increased visibility will solve their IT challenges. Yet when an incident hits, a patch fails or an audit looms, many teams must pause to reconcile spreadsheets, validate inventories and confirm ownership before they can act. Visibility alone doesn’t close the gap between insight and execution.

This post was co-written with Staff Software Engineer Martin Holman. Honeycomb Canvas is a collaborative investigation environment. When something goes wrong in production, multiple engineers might join the same Canvas to debug it together. Each person has their own AI agent, so they can pursue their own conversation thread and line of inquiry. This creates an opportunity for coordination.

How to build governance into autonomous security agents from the architecture up The industry has moved fast on capabilities. Agents now triage alerts, investigate endpoints, create detection rules, and enrich indicators, and they are even capable of performing most actions we as security operators can perform. The architecture patterns are maturing, as are the models, but governance is not keeping pace.

Kubernetes is built for containers, and it’s been doing that since it used to run docker as an engine for its containers. But what if you want to add VMs to the mix? After all, containers are ephemeral and don’t require fixed IPs as they shift the identity toward labels, but VMs on the other hand are tied to IP addresses and in some cases MAC addresses. This brings us to this blog about VM migration and IP preservation.

Once a year, the Icinga team goes for a team event somewhere about an hour or two away from the office. This year’s edition landed us at the Adventure Campus in Treuchtlichen, right in the middle of this year’s first heatwave. The heat was unbearable. At one point we gave up on the room we had been using and moved everyone down into a basement meeting room instead. It was quite a bit more retro in style, with an overhead projector, that we had a lot of fun with.

Merge conflicts rarely make it into a sprint retrospective, but they should. They’re one of the most reliable ways to lose an hour of flow without anyone noticing it’s gone. Every developer expects them eventually, but almost nobody questions the workflow around resolving them.