Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As developers, we continually strive to improve our software. This often means rolling out new software features at a rapid pace. However, deploying new features to production is not without risk. From no real production testing to limited rollback options, traditional deployment can quickly become frustrating. The worst issues, though, usually stem from one thing: buggy features making their way into the hands of users.

I joined incident.io about ten weeks ago, having been in my previous role for four and a half years. Being a new starter was an unusual feeling for me, and there's been a huge amount to learn; but by lunch on my second day (!) I had started shipping value to our customers. A large part of hitting the ground running has been having a colleague alongside me, who I can pester with questions, who doesn’t get offended when I write in all capitals, and often praises me for being absolutely right!

In the fast-paced world of digital operations, the gap between detecting an issue and resolving it can mean the difference between a blip in service and a full-scale customer impact. That’s why organizations worldwide rely on ServiceNow for IT service management and xMatters for intelligent incident response automation.

Grafana puts a powerful set of observability capabilities right at your fingertips, but onboarding entire teams to the sophisticated platform is often a nontrivial exercise—one that can slow adoption and prevent organizations from getting immediate value. We want to make the process as frictionless as possible, which is why we’re excited to tell you that Grafana Assistant is now available in public preview to all Grafana Cloud users.

Did you know that observability has been around for more than six decades? It all goes back to a Hungarian-American inventor named Rudolf Kálmán who thought about how external outputs could measure the internal state of a machine. Kálmán wrote about monitoring single-input single-output systems, but our demands are very different today. We need to observe monoliths, microservices, clusters, pods, regions, and many more.

If you’ve spent any time managing networks, you know the switch is the backbone that keeps everything connected, but it’s easy to take them for granted until something breaks. Monitoring network switches isn’t just “nice to have”; it’s critical if you want to avoid those sudden outages that bring everything to a halt.