It’s hard to believe Grafana Play has been around for almost a decade. The platform continues to be a great way to demo Grafana, play around with new features, learn what’s possible, and simply have fun with data. Grafana Play provides a publicly available version of Grafana Cloud, and requires no login for access. It’s preloaded with a wide range of sample dashboards that teach users how to work with data sources, create visualizations, and explore advanced Grafana features.

2025 kicks off with a portion of handy ilert updates!

The long-awaited InfluxDB 3 Core is finally here, introducing a powerful new way to manage your time series data. InfluxDB 3 Core is an open source recent-data engine for time series and event data. It’s currently in public Alpha under MIT/ Apache 2 license. In this post, we’ll dive into how to query and write data using the Python client library, unlocking the full potential of InfluxDB v3 Core with clear, hands-on examples.

The stress, sudden disruptions, and high stakes of resolving issues while on call is one of the most challenging aspects of an engineer’s job. Many organizations, from startups to large enterprises, still struggle with their on-call experience, which leads to longer resolution times and lower employee retention rates. Constant context switching, managing multiple tools, and racing against time to resolve issues can cause frustration, burnout, and inefficiency.

When building modern applications, choosing the right communication protocol is crucial for performance, scalability, and ease of integration. Among the most common options, gRPC, HTTP, and REST often come up in discussions, each with its strengths and weaknesses. But how do you know which one to use? Let’s break it down in this comprehensive comparison.

Cron jobs are an essential tool for automating repetitive tasks in backend development. Whether you're running scheduled tasks like sending out emails, cleaning up databases, or performing regular backups, a cron job in Node.js can handle the heavy lifting. In this guide, we’ll walk through everything you need to know about cron jobs in Node.js, from setup to execution.

Encountering an "upstream connect error" often indicates an issue with your network or server configuration. Whether you're managing microservices or using a load balancer, this error points to a breakdown in communication. This guide will walk you through troubleshooting and resolving the issue effectively.

They might seem very similar at first sight, but when you zoom in on them, the differences are more apparent. Status Pages and Service Health Dashboards serve distinct purposes and cater to different audiences. As organizations adopt more complex systems, the tools used to communicate about service health and performance have become equally important. Let’s dive into the key differences, use cases, and how these tools complement each other.

Let's be honest – managing servers isn't getting any easier. With distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and complex applications, there's more to monitor than ever before. You could try keeping track of everything manually. There's nothing inherently wrong with checking your server metrics yourself and responding to issues as they come up. But here's the reality: if you want to run a reliable, high-performing system, you need proper monitoring tools.

Data engineering. Data science. Machine learning. Data governance. These are just a few of the many capabilities that make Databricks a favorite among developers and data engineers. Yet, most have one common complaint — its cost. Some say it’s too expensive, especially for small and medium-sized organizations. Others find it hard to justify using the platform due to budget limits. In addition, maintaining and running data warehouses can be costly.