Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

March 2025

Elasticsearch vs. Solr: What Developers Need to Know in 2025

When your project calls for a high-performance search solution, the Elasticsearch vs. Solr debate inevitably surfaces. Both are Lucene-powered search engines with passionate communities, but their architectural approaches and performance characteristics differ significantly. This guide dives into the technical nuances that matter to developers and DevOps professionals, helping you make an informed decision based on concrete metrics and real-world implementation considerations.

How to Make the Most of Redis Pipeline

If you’ve been using Redis but haven’t explored pipelining, you’re missing out on some significant performance benefits. Redis pipelining is like a hidden gem—those who know about it can’t imagine working without it. In this guide, we’ll break down why pipelining is important and how it can help improve the efficiency of your applications.

High vs Low Cardinality: Is Your Observability Stack Failing?

Imagine trying to find a friend in a packed stadium with 50,000 people versus spotting them in a quiet coffee shop. That’s the difference between high and low cardinality data. And if you’re working with distributed systems or microservices, this isn’t just a theoretical distinction—it’s a fundamental challenge that can make or break your observability setup.

Logging Best Practices to Reduce Noise and Improve Insights

Are your logs helping you, or are they just creating more work? If you’re sifting through endless data but still missing the important details, you’re not alone. It’s a common challenge—but one that can be solved. For anyone managing infrastructure, logs are essential. They show what’s happening, what’s broken, and sometimes even why. But without the right approach, they can easily turn into clutter instead of clarity.

Prometheus API: From Basics to Advanced Usage

Monitoring your infrastructure shouldn’t be a shot in the dark. The Prometheus API helps you pull the right metrics so you actually know what’s going on. Whether you’re just getting started or trying to make sense of your current setup, this guide breaks down how to use the API to get the answers you need—without the guesswork.

Nginx Logging: A Complete Guide for Beginners

So, you're wrestling with Nginx logs, huh? Been there. In fact, I used to spend way too much time hunting down log files until I finally got smart about it. Let me save you the trouble. Nginx logs are like the black box flight recorder for your web server. When everything crashes and burns (and it will), those logs are often the only evidence left to figure out what happened. But first, you need to know where to find them.

Advanced Container Resource Monitoring with docker stats

If you’ve ever needed to check how much CPU or memory a Docker container is using, docker stats is the command for the job. It provides real-time resource usage metrics, helping you monitor and troubleshoot containers efficiently. This guide covers everything you need to know about docker stats: how to use it, what each metric means, and how to integrate it into a larger monitoring setup.

Everything You Need to Know About SIEM Logs

That moment when your production system goes down, and you're stuck piecing together logs from twenty different services? It’s frustrating and slow—especially when you need answers fast. SIEM logs help bring order to this chaos, giving you a structured way to track security events and system activity. But understanding how to use them effectively isn’t always straightforward, and most documentation can feel more complicated than the problem itself.

Getting Started with the Grafana API: Practical Use Cases

Building dashboards one by one in Grafana can quickly become tedious. Clicking through the UI for every change isn’t exactly efficient. There’s a better way. The Grafana API lets you automate repetitive tasks and extend Grafana’s capabilities beyond the UI. If you're new to monitoring or managing a complex observability setup, understanding the API can make your workflow more efficient and scalable.

Python Logging Exceptions: The Setup Guide You Actually Need

Debugging a Python app can be frustrating, especially when an unexpected crash leaves behind nothing but a vague error message. A well-configured exception log can make all the difference, turning guesswork into clear insights. Here’s how to set up logging that actually helps.

How to Use journalctl --last to Check Recent System Logs

When your Linux server starts acting up at 3 AM, you don't need a philosophy lesson—you need answers. Fast. That's where journalctl last comes in, the command-line equivalent of having a time machine for your system's events. If you've been piecing together log information like some digital detective with a cork board and string, it's time to upgrade your toolkit. Let's cut through the noise and get you the intel you need, when you need it.

EC2 Monitoring: A Practical Guide for AWS Engineers

Monitoring your EC2 instances shouldn’t be complicated or exhausting. Yet, too often, engineers find themselves troubleshooting issues in the middle of the night, searching for the root cause of an unexpected failure. Whether you're managing a few instances or hundreds spread across multiple regions, effective EC2 monitoring helps you stay ahead of problems instead of constantly reacting to them. And if you've ever dealt with a critical alert at an inconvenient hour, you know how important that is.

Nginx Error Logs: Troubleshooting and Security Guide

Nginx error logs can be tough to decipher, even for experienced sysadmins and DevOps engineers. They hold valuable clues about what’s going wrong, but sorting through them can feel overwhelming. Understanding these logs doesn’t have to be a challenge. This guide breaks them down in a clear, practical way—so you can find the issues that matter and fix them with confidence.