Observability is essential for understanding how modern applications perform and behave in production. OpenTelemetry has emerged as the industry standard for collecting, processing, and exporting telemetry data—traces, metrics, and logs—without vendor lock-in. This guide will walk you through OpenTelemetry’s core components, how it works, and why it’s a game-changer for observability.

Let’s Encrypt has announced that it will no longer send certificate expiration notification emails. If you’ve relied on those emails to remind you when to renew your SSL/TLS certificates, it’s time to rethink your approach.

Disk IO (Input/Output) is a core aspect of system performance. Whether you’re managing a database, a web application, or a cloud server, how efficiently your system reads and writes data affects everything from response times to stability. Unlike high CPU usage or memory bottlenecks that often manifest immediately, disk IO issues tend to creep up silently—until they slow down critical processes.

Imagine you’ve got a leaky faucet in your kitchen. At first, it’s just a drip here and there—annoying, sure, but not enough to ruin your day. But leave it unchecked, and soon that drip turns into a steady trickle. Your water bill skyrockets, the sink overflows, and before you know it, you’re ankle-deep in chaos. Now, replace that faucet with a Linux system, and you’ve got a memory leak.

Every server administrator’s nightmare starts with a message: “CPU usage at 100%” It’s that critical moment when your Linux server transforms from a reliable workhorse into a sluggish mess, taking your applications and user experience down. We’ve all been there… staring at a terminal, watching load averages climb, while frantically trying to figure out which process decided to throw a CPU-hungry party on our server.