Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Are your Java applications running at their optimal performance, or is there room for improvement to make them faster and more efficient? With so many services depending on Java, keeping applications responsive and reliable is a core part of modern software engineering. This blog walks you through the leading Java Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools, with a clear comparison to help you choose the right option for your needs.

OpenMetrics and OpenTelemetry are popular standards for instrumenting cloud-native applications. Both projects are part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and aim to simplify how we generate, collect and monitor services in a modern cloud-native distributed application environment. Let's have a look at how both the standards are aiming to help solve the observability conundrum.

A few days ago I hosted a live conversation with Pranav, co-founder of Chatwoot, about issues his team was running into with LLM observability. The short version: building, debugging, and improving AI agents in production gets messy fast. There's multiple competing standards for default libraries for LLM observability. And many such libraries like OpenInference which claim to be based on OpenTelemetry don't strictly adhere to it's conventions.

To effectively manage modern applications, you need to understand how they work on the inside. Distributed tracing is the key to this, providing a detailed picture of a request's journey across every service. OpenTelemetry has emerged as the industry-standard framework for implementing tracing and achieving true observability in complex, distributed systems. In this article, we embark on a journey to explore the core concept of context propagation within Open Telemetry.

OpenTelemetry is a broader, vendor-neutral framework for generating and collecting telemetry data (logs, metrics, traces), offering flexible backend integration. Jaeger, on the other hand, is focused on distributed tracing in microservices. Earlier Jaeger had its own SDKs based on OpenTracing APIs for instrumenting applications, but now Jaeger recommends using OpenTelemetry instrumentation and SDKs. Warning The original Jaeger client SDKs (based on OpenTracing) are archived and no longer maintained.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) helps you understand how your software runs in production. When you track the right metrics, you see how requests move through your system, where slowdowns happen, and how resources are being used. With this knowledge, you can spot issues early and keep your applications reliable for your users. In this blog, we discuss the key APM metrics to monitor, grouped into categories, and why each one matters for performance and user experience.

We talked to 7 companies in August 2025 who were looking to switch from New Relic. One engineering director said they're paying $1,000 a month and only ingesting 10% of their traces. Teams are defaulting to aggressive sampling, some at 1%, others at 10%, to manage costs.

In this post, we will talk about OpenTelemetry exporters. OpenTelemetry exporters help in exporting the telemetry data collected by OpenTelemetry. OpenTelemetry frees you from any kind of vendor lock-in by letting you export the collected telemetry data to any backend of your choice. In modern distributed systems, efficiently collecting, transmitting, and analyzing telemetry data from diverse sources poses a significant challenge.

Microservices make it tough to understand how applications behave end-to-end. Most teams already rely on an Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tool to track system health. But as requests move across many services, you also need distributed tracing. Jaeger gives you that visibility. The real value comes from connecting the two. Instead of running APM and Jaeger in silos, you can combine their strengths, metrics from your APM, and traces from Jaeger, to get a clearer view of performance.

Slow logons, laggy VDI sessions, and poor Horizon performance are common pain points IT admins face frequently. When Omnissa Horizon environments slow down, both end-users and IT teams feel the pressure—users grow frustrated while admins struggle to troubleshoot without complete visibility. To uncover the real-world Horizon issues admins face, we turned to Reddit forums like r/VMwareHorizon, r/sysadmin, and r/Citrix, where IT professionals openly share their Horizon troubleshooting struggles.