If you are familiar with OpenTracing and OpenCensus, then you have probably already heard of the OpenTelemetry project. OpenTelemetry merges the OpenTracing and OpenCensus projects to provide a standard collection of APIs, libraries, and other tools to capture distributed request traces and metrics from applications and easily export them to third-party monitoring platforms.

In the era of reliability, where mere minutes of downtime or latency can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, 24x7 availability and on-call coverage to respond to incidents has become a requirement for the vast majority of organizations. But setting up an on-call system that drives effective incident response while minimizing the stress placed on engineers isn’t a trivial task.

Maintaining business continuity is both more difficult and more important than ever in the era of COVID-19. Typically, IT departments evolve their approaches and technologies over time to meet the needs of customers. But that approach may soon be outdated thanks to the global pandemic.

Jaeger primarily supports two backends: Cassandra and Elasticsearch. Here at Grafana Labs we use Scylla, an open source Cassandra-compatible backend. In this post we’ll look at how we run Scylla at scale and share some techniques to reduce load while ingesting even more spans. We’ll also share some internal metrics about Jaeger load and Scylla backend performance. Special thanks to the Scylla team for spending some time with us to talk about performance and configuration!

Time trolls people. It speeds up in good times and slows down in bad. For instance, when you push code, your brain feels like it’s in a whirlwind. But when you’re debugging subsequent errors, the hours seem to slog by. This is particularly true if you are operating without context and without the help of automation. Fortunately, our friends at GitHub built an automation platform for products like Sentry to integrate with: Sentry Release GitHub Action.

As the automation surface area grows to accommodate hundreds of interconnected APIs on the cloud, developers are using their own, home-grown “digital duct tape” to manage a growing “DevOps dumping ground”. For a lot of organizations, home-grown glue logic is inconsistent, not repeatable, and expensive to maintain hundreds of event-based workflows and thousands of combinations. We believe that the answer lies in automation workflows.

I’m excited that ServiceNow has been named a Leader in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Software Asset Management Tools. We were recognized for our Software Asset Management (SAM) solution, which we believe helps reduce software costs and mitigate license compliance risk with actionable IT insights. We think It’s a great example of how ServiceNow makes work, work better for people. ServiceNow innovates by listening to our customers.

As an executive your focus is always on delivering the most value from every investment. Value for your customers, and of course value for yourself. Yet there are so many places in the value delivery process where things can – and do – go wrong. The term “value stream” describes the end- to-end process of developing and delivering software to your clients.

I recently spoke with Alex Skrivseth, the Operations Manager at The Shed App, and discovered how he’s using InfluxDB to monitor the current levels of gas and diesel at various gas stations. Simply by extracting IoT sensor data, he has been able to provide valuable previously inaccessible data to fuel truck drivers.

There’s no debating the value of digital transformation when it comes to optimal business performance, but for many IT leaders, some digital initiatives are pushed to the backburner due to other priorities. Over the last few months, COVID-19 has forced a number of those initiatives to the top of the list. From businesses transitioning to remote work, to schools closing, to travel plans being canceled, no one was fully prepared for what the world would face this year.