"Who doesn't love monitoring?" said no one ever. Well, no one but me. Seriously. I love monitoring, but oftentimes I felt like I was the only one. After 23 years at Purdue University I decided that it was time to change things up, try something new, and start looking to see if monitoring could be fun, interesting, and actually creative for someone other than myself. Surprisingly for me, SquaredUp was also interested in the same thing!

This year we introduced the Sentry Integration Platform, which allows 3rd-party developers to build integrations that connect Sentry with their software. More recently we launched Internal Integrations, which lets developers combine Sentry with their internal tools to support their own custom workflows.

This blog post is a writeup of the presentation Bartek Plotka and I gave at PromCon 2019. Cortex is a horizontally scalable, clustered Prometheus implementation aimed at giving users a global view of all their Prometheus metrics in one place, and providing long term storage for those metrics. Thanos is newer project aimed at solving the same challenges. In this blog post, we compare these two projects and see how it is possible to have two completely different approaches to the same problems.

It is increasingly clear that tools developed to keep a single system or a small cluster running are no longer sufficient in today’s highly distributed, complex environment. The tools that offer service assurance must be able to move their way through complex application systems and prevent slowdowns or application failures. These complex systems now include physical systems, virtual systems and even systems found in a cloud service provider’s data center.

We are excited to announce the General Availability release of our PHP APM agent. You can now monitor your Laravel applications out of the box, and support for more PHP frameworks is in the works!

Predictive analytics for networks are helping businesses optimize their network performance, anticipate network capacity related requirements, and eventually forecast future much more efficiently than ever. Gartner has estimated the value of network monitoring software market at roughly $2.1 Billion, this figure is presently increasing at a growth rate of 15.9% annually. The demand for predictive analytics in network monitoring software has grown beyond enterprises and datacentres.

Whether you’re new to development or a seasoned developer, containers have proven to be game-changing in building, testing, and deploying applications. This article is meant as a quick introduction to the world of containers. To get started, you’ll need to install Docker to follow along with the examples. If you haven’t installed Docker yet, head over to their website to get it installed. There are free versions available for all major operating systems.

At SolarWinds® Papertrail™, we know that when you’re combing through lines and lines of long event messages, every pixel matters. That’s why in the new Papertrail event viewer, we introduced the ability to hide the application chrome. Hiding the application chrome, or ‘presentation mode,’ removes the header and navigation menus and maximizes your screen real estate. So far the feedback on this new option has been great.

Ever since container technology hit the scene in 2013, it’s generated excitement from developers and operations teams. Using containers to deliver apps and microservices helps enable large scalable deployments with smoother rollouts, accomplishing in minutes what used to take hours, if not days. Delivering the containers themselves, however, can still be challenging to do across all types of modern infrastructure.

In order to keep digital services running around the clock, teams need to be able to solve problems faster—or, ideally, in real time. Many vendors claim to provide value and help organizations bolster their digital operations management.