2017 was a bad year for fires in California. The Tubbs Fire in Sonoma County in October destroyed whole neighborhoods and sent toxic smoke south through most of the San Francisco Bay Area. The Air Quality Index (AQI) for parts of that area went up past the unhealthy level (101–150) to the hazardous level (301–500) at certain points during the fire. Once word got out that N99 dust masks were needed to keep the harmful particles out of the lungs, they became a common sight.

Operating containerized infrastructure brings with it a new set of challenges. You need to instrument your containers, evaluate your API endpoint performance, and identify bad actors within your infrastructure. The Istio service mesh enables instrumentation of APIs without code change and provides service latencies for free. But how do you make sense all that data? With math, that’s how.

This was a frequent request we were hearing from many customers: "How can I analyze my data with Python?" The Python Data Science toolchain (Jupyter/NumPy/pandas) offers a wide spectrum of advanced data analytics capabilities. Therefore, seamless integration with this environment is important for our customers who want to make use of those tools.

Opinions vary in recent online discussions regarding systems and software observability. Some state that observability is a replacement for monitoring. Others that they are parallel mechanisms, or that one is a subset of another (not to mention where tracing fits into such a hierarchy). Monitoring Weekly recently provided a helpful list of resources for an overview of this discussion, as well as some practical applications of observability.

How do you capture and organize billions of measurements per second such that you can answer a rich set of queries effectively (percentiles, counts below X, aggregations across streams), and you don’t blow through your AWS budget in minutes? To effectively manage billions of data points, your system has to be both performant and scalable. How do you accomplish that? Not only do your algorithms have to be on point, but your implementation of them has to be efficient.

The Linux kernel is an abundant component of modern IT systems. It provides the critical services of hardware abstraction and time-sharing to applications. The classical metrics for monitoring Linux are among the most well known metrics in monitoring: CPU utilization, memory usage, disk utilization, and network throughput. For a while now, Circonus installations have organized, the key system metrics in the form of a USE Dashboard, as a high level overview of the system resources.

The Circonus team is excited to announce the release of our newest update, which includes sweeping changes to the Circonus Monitoring Platform UI. This update is part of an ongoing effort to optimize the Circonus UI for performance and usability on mobile devices, such as phones and tablets, as well as on media PCs, desktops, and laptops, and almost every single change to our familiar UI directly supports that optimization. You’ll find that just about every single page is now responsive.