Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Reality Bytes: Jon Leighton Returns! How Community Continues to Shape DEX

Head of Nexthink's Digital Community and User Groups Jon Leighton rejoins Reality Bytes with Tom, Sean, and Dina to explore how community remains the beating heart of Digital Employee Experience (DEX). Fresh from Experience London and heading into Experience Boston, Jon shares how Nexthink’s Ambassador Program, user groups, and learning initiatives empower practitioners to grow, collaborate, and lead change. From storytelling and communication to real-world impact and career development, this episode celebrates the people and connections driving DEX forward.

Implement Distributed Tracing with Spring Boot 3

A slow checkout request. A background job stuck waiting on another service. A log message that looks fine — until performance drops. In a Node.js microservices setup, these are the moments that test your observability. You know something's wrong, but tracing the request across dozens of services feels impossible. Distributed tracing changes that. It connects every span in the request's journey, showing exactly where time is spent and where things start to break down.

The 2025 Guide to Open Source Status Page Software

This is an updated version of the 2024 article. Maintaining transparent communication about service availability is crucial for businesses of all sizes. Status pages are an important part of your communication strategy during times of outages and maintenance events. You can choose to go with a fully managed status page provider or host an open-source one yourself.

Announcing the AI chief of staff for engineering leaders

You see MTTR creeping up, but you don’t know why. You could ask your teams, but that means meetings, pulling people off projects, and waiting days for answers. What if you could just…ask? We’re excited to introduce the new strategic AI chief of staff for engineering leadership, powered by the Cortex MCP. By connecting your Engineering Intelligence data with your scorecards and standards, the MCP allows you to have a strategic conversation about your organization’s performance.

Your metrics, your way: Announcing custom views in Engineering Intelligence

Every engineering organization measures success differently. A dashboard that’s perfect for one team might be meaningless for another. While out-of-the-box views for DORA are a great starting point, leaders need the ability to define and share the specific combination of metrics that matter most to their business. Without this, you're either forcing your teams to conform to generic reports or wasting time rebuilding the same views every week.

Understand how AI is affecting your engineering team with Cortex's AI Impact Dashboard

Rolling out a powerful AI tool like GitHub Copilot is a big win for any engineering leader. But because it’s such a significant investment, leadership will inevitably ask if it was worth the cost. Until now, answering this was nearly impossible. While GitHub provides adoption stats, connecting that data to real-world performance metrics like cycle time or code quality has been a manual, frustrating process. We built the Cortex AI Impact Dashboard to provide a clear answer.

Creating an effective Configuration Management Database (CMDB)

In this lecture, we explain how to create a CMDB (Configuration Management Database) that truly supports IT Asset Lifecycle Management. A CMDB acts as the central hub of information about your assets and their relationships. Done right, it gives you the visibility and accuracy needed to reduce risks, improve decision-making, and ensure smoother operations across every phase of the asset lifecycle. Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and turn on notifications to keep learning how to optimize your IT assets.

CIDR blocks vs. IP ranges: Aligning network discovery with business value

At every turn, IT leaders are required to prove the value of every technology investment. Technology business management (TBM) practices encourage connecting tech spend directly to business outcomes, demanding accurate data about what’s in your network and how it supports the organization.

Monitor logs from Amazon EKS on Fargate with Datadog

Amazon EKS on Fargate is a managed service that reduces the operational overhead of maintaining a Kubernetes cluster by abstracting away the underlying infrastructure. In a serverless Fargate environment, each pod is assigned its own isolated compute resources; there is no direct host-level access.

Want to Master IT Infrastructure Management In Minutes? Start Here!

Master IT Infrastructure Management in Minutes with this step-by-step tutorial designed for beginners and professionals alike. In this video, we’ll break down the core components of IT infrastructure, from servers and networks to storage, security, and cloud integration. Learn how to manage and monitor your organization’s IT systems efficiently using real-world examples and modern tools. Discover best practices that top IT managers use to ensure uptime, reliability, and performance across all environments. Watch till the end to become an IT pro in no time!