Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Ensuring digital services remain accessible, reliable, and secure is a high priority for any organization operating at scale. For the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), this focus is central to its mission of providing quality care to veterans, their families, and caregivers. Often described as “the largest IT shop in the United States,” the VA manages 2.7 million pieces of equipment across a vast network of interconnected systems.

Cloud object storage powers a wide range of workloads, from AI training datasets to customer-facing media libraries. As your data grows into the petabyte scale, managing storage costs and ensuring reliability requires fine-grained visibility. You need answers to questions like: Which specific teams, services, workloads, or datasets are driving spend? Which data is cold and should be archived? What fixes will have the biggest impact on cost and performance?

Once, when I was a very junior developer, I was discussing a bug with a very senior developer (let's call him Burt). Satisfied with the fix, I said something like "oh, that was a great bug". He looked at me as if his eyes were going to fall out of his head. Clearly, this enraged him. He briefly went off about how there are no great bugs, there are only bugs to squash – and that’s all.

Performance defines player experience. When a game lags, crashes, or delays inputs, players lose patience. In competitive and live-service titles, even a few hundred milliseconds can decide whether someone keeps playing or uninstalls for good. Modern games rely on complex ecosystems built on cloud servers, microservices, and real-time data synchronization. Millions of concurrent players generate massive workloads that test the limits of any infrastructure.

When you run services on Quarkus, you need a steady stream of signals to understand how the application behaves—CPU trends, request timings, memory patterns, and how each endpoint responds under load. Metrics give you that visibility. They help answer questions like: OpenTelemetry fits well here because it gives Quarkus a common way to generate and export metrics without locking you into a specific monitoring tool.

When teams manage a high volume of alerts, it’s easy for things to start blending together. A system outage, a temperature warning, a network slowdown – without a way to quickly identify what’s what, it takes longer to triage and prioritize. Especially on mobile, scrolling through a list of similar-looking alerts can slow your response and add confusion during incidents.

Singapore’s digital economy is growing at a remarkable pace, but with that growth comes a challenge: the nation is on track to need more than a million additional digitally skilled workers by 2026, particularly in cybersecurity, data, and AI. This is not just about filling jobs — it’s about ensuring the country’s long-term digital resilience.

Businesses today have more access to information about their products and engineering teams than ever before, and the push to be data-driven is also at an all-time high. Engineering metrics can provide actionable insights that help accelerate technology and business impact.