As a team, we have spent many years troubleshooting performance problems in production systems. Applications have become so complex that you need a standard methodology to understand performance. Our approach to this problem is called the Golden Signals. By measuring these signals and paying very close attention to these four key metrics, providers can simplify even the most complex systems into an understandable corpus of services and systems.

For a fast-paced work environment, effective on-call management is crucial for maintaining seamless operations. Whether you’re in IT or any other industry that requires constant availability, the on-call system ensures that teams can respond to critical incidents efficiently. However, achieving optimal on-call management isn’t just about being available—it’s about collaboration, communication, and ensuring team health.

This enhancement is part of Raygun’s 12 Days of Christmas 2024. Over the past few weeks, we’ve shared daily updates on bug fixes and feature improvements inspired by feedback from you, our customers. These are the small but impactful changes you’ve asked for, designed to make Raygun faster and easier to use. Merry Christmas and thanks for following along—we’re excited to keep enhancing the tools you rely on!

Top tips is a weekly column where we highlight what’s trending in the tech world and list ways to explore these trends. This week, we explore ways in which IT admins can optimize the IT infrastructure during the holidays while leaving room for enjoyment. December is here, and the holiday spirit is in the air. While you prune your Christmas tree at the start of the holiday season, your IT infrastructure requires consistent pruning throughout the year by IT admins.

The scene is familiar to any IT operations professional: the dreaded 3 AM call, multiple monitoring tools showing conflicting status indicators, and teams pointing fingers instead of solving problems. For managed service providers (MSPs) supporting hundreds or thousands of customers, this challenge multiplies exponentially. But at AWS re:Invent 2024, Synoptek’s team revealed how they’ve fundamentally transformed this reality for their 1,200+ customer base through AI-powered observability.

Today’s IT teams face unprecedented challenges as they manage increasingly complex hybrid and multi-cloud environments and vast amounts of data. The pressure to maintain uptime, optimize performance, and ensure security – all while balancing limited resources – has become a daunting task for even the most seasoned professionals. So how can these organizations stay ahead of the curve?

When we launched our fully-featured Microsoft Teams integration in May, our goal was clear: to provide enterprise teams with the robust and comprehensive toolset they need to manage incidents faster and more effectively – right where they work. It’s all part of our commitment to building the leading enterprise incident management solution. Today, we’ve enhanced our Teams integration by adding the ability to automatically create Microsoft Teams group chats directly from your Runbooks.

Are your IT systems underperforming due to incomplete or outdated data? In ITOps, where quick and accurate decision-making is critical, raw data alone can limit efficiency. Data enrichment adds the context needed to turn basic data into a powerful source of actionable insights.

At ilert, one of the key tools in our debugging process is the Event Explorer, which provides an extensive overview of incoming events and their processing lifecycle. By reflecting the event process of an alert source, the Event Explorer allows our team to trace event paths, correlate related data, and identify issues quickly.

On December 11, 2024, millions of users around the globe experienced disruptions across Meta’s core platforms: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Reports of connectivity issues and outages began flooding social media and third-party monitoring platforms as users scrambled to understand what was happening. While Meta issued a statement later in the evening attributing the outage to unspecified “technical issues,” the delayed acknowledgment left countless businesses and users in the dark.