Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Join the live stream at 11 am ET, here. Platform teams tend to start with just one, or in some cases a handful of OpenTelemetry (OTel) Collectors usually running in gateway mode. They then embrace the benefit of a vendor-neutral, standardized, telemetry collector for unified logs, metrics, and traces.

Distributed tracing tracks requests as they flow through microservices, revealing bottlenecks, failures, and performance patterns. Without proper tracing, debugging production issues becomes guesswork—especially in complex architectures with dozens of services. Modern applications generate millions of traces daily. The right vendor helps you extract actionable insights without drowning in data or breaking your budget.

OpenTelemetry (OTel) is emerging as the industry standard for collecting and transmitting observability data. Datadog supports several ways to send and accept OTel-native data, while also continuing to support its own native telemetry format. To provide a consistent monitoring experience, Datadog now supports using OTel-native metrics alongside Datadog-native metrics across dashboards, queries, and core visualizations in the Datadog platform.

Join the live stream at 11 am ET, here. OpenTelemetry’s super-power has always been: Choice. Yet, most observability vendors still insist you run their collector. Today we’re removing that last point of friction. With Bring Your Own Collector (BYOC), Bindplane now accepts any upstream-compatible build, recognizes exactly which receivers, processors, and exporters it contains, and adapts the UI and configuration workflow on the fly.

Over time, web applications have evolved from simple request/response-based systems into complex, distributed ones with lots of moving parts. If something goes wrong (and you can be sure it will), finding the cause can be nearly impossible. But this need not be the case: enter tracing. Tracing refers to the process of collecting detailed information about the execution of requests within an application, including function calls, execution time, and other relevant data.

When requests slow down across your microservices, tracing helps you understand where time is spent. Jaeger and Zipkin are two popular tools for distributed tracing, built to answer a simple question: where did the request go? If you're choosing between them or just exploring options, this guide breaks down the differences and when each one might be a better fit.

In a microservices setup, tracking a single request across services quickly gets complex. One service calls another, then a third, and your logs don’t line up. The traceparent header carries context between services, so all parts of a request connect back to the start. For example, when a frontend sends a request to an API, which then calls a database service, traceparent it links those calls in the trace. Without it, you’re left guessing how requests flow.

Podman is a modern, open-source container engine developed by Red Hat that serves as a powerful alternative to Docker. It's designed with security, composability, and simplicity in mind. Here’s why it stands out.

"All language is but a poor translation." — Franz Kafka This quote by Franz Kafka reminds me of the time when I used to look at metrics from “Apache Kafka” topics trying to figure out what was causing the huge lags and manually deleting the messages in certain partitions to get rid of polluted messages. Yep, pretty lost in translation. I wasn’t aware of the power of observability for a Kafka producer-topic-consumer system.