Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Explore IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS cloud models to accelerate your shipping. This guide defines each, compares their benefits and drawbacks, and introduces a modern approach to get IaaS power with PaaS simplicity.

I’ve spent most of my career building and optimizing cloud, on-prem, and data platforms for growing companies. It’s been an amazing journey so far. Through it all, FinOps has become more than just a methodology for me (Fred FinOps didn’t just come from my love of the Flintstones, though I do appreciate a good cartoon). It’s a community, a discipline, a tribe I’ve come to call home. Lately, some tough questions have kept me up at night: These challenges got me thinking.

Earlier this year, we launched the StatusGator Women in Tech Scholarship to support and empower women pursuing careers in technology. We are thrilled to announce that our 2025 scholarship recipient is Lara Djukic, an inspiring young technologist whose vision blends innovation with a deep commitment to her community. Through the Bold.org scholarship platform, we’ve award Lara a $3,100 scholarship.

Managing technology in K12 schools means juggling dozens of critical platforms simultaneously. When Google Workspace goes down during morning classes, Canvas experiences issues during exam submissions, or PowerSchool becomes unavailable during grade entry periods, the impact ripples through entire school communities. The ability to monitor multiple school platforms from a centralized dashboard has become essential for educational IT teams.

When a service slows down, metrics will tell you that it’s happening but logs tell you why. For MySQL, slow queries can be a silent performance killer, gradually chewing through resources until users start complaining. By enabling MySQL’s slow query log and forwarding it to Loki (via Promtail), you can visualize query-level details right alongside your metrics on Grafana dashboards. This makes it easy to correlate what is slow (metrics) with what is causing the slowdown (logs).