You’re at the checkout in a supermarket, and suddenly, the payment system stops working. Frustrating, right? Unfortunately, this is an all-too-common scenario that explains why some people think twice before shopping in person. It isn't just a problem for shoppers—it's a major headache for businesses that operate across multiple locations.

“Internet Performance Monitoring solutions close the observability gap…” states Enterprise Management Associates in its new White Paper, Modern Enterprises Must Boost Observability with Internet Performance Monitoring. How? “…By providing visibility into global Internet performance and reporting on how that performance impacts application performance and end-user experience.”

A highlight of the SRE Report is the insightful analysis based on the organizational ranks of respondents. The 2023 installment exposed significant misalignment between practitioners and management in several key areas, including the benefits of AIOps, the challenge of tool sprawl, and attitudes towards blamelessness. While the 2024 SRE Report showed a rare consensus on the importance of monitoring external endpoints, it uncovered yet more ongoing differences. Let’s dive in.

How should we define technological progress in the digital era? Is it merely the proliferation of gadgets and gizmos, or does it lie in the seamlessness of our digital encounters? Recently, I moved to Dubai, the Gulf Cooperation Council’s (GCC) major trading hub and a city celebrated as the “City of the Future.” But does Dubai’s technological innovation extend to the resilience of its digital service vendors?

We live in a data-rich world - every click, swipe, like, share, and purchase online generates data points companies use to optimize offerings. However, even vast real-world data has limitations in developing robust artificial intelligence (AI) and data models, particularly with regard to AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations). Enter synthetic data.

The 2024 SRE Report highlights a pivotal shift in how organizations approach the reliability and monitoring of their services, especially those that extend beyond their direct control. According to the report, 64% of organizations now recognize the importance of monitoring productivity or experience-disrupting endpoints, even beyond their physical control.

This is a follow-up to our previously published post announcing Traceroute InSession, where we provided extensive technical details about how it works. In this series, we explore the challenges InSession addresses within modern networks and compare it to other traceroute variants. At Catchpoint, we pride ourselves on being traceroute experts. Why? We’ve run over 15 billion traceroutes over the last 15 years and more than 3 billion in 2023 alone!

Continuing our series on tracing with OpenTelemetry in AWS Kinesis, we now explore a refined approach to overcome the challenges faced in our initial attempt with the PartitionKey parameter.