Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Application Performance Monitoring (APM), tracing, and observability are fundamental software development and system management approaches. Each of these three concepts uniquely ensures that your applications operate, efficiently, smoothly, and reliably. Your organisation will more than likely already adopt one of these approaches, or even two, potentially all three.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently released a new cloud deployment option – ”Dedicated Local Zones” targeted at public sector, government and regulated industry use cases. Many customers still rely on on-premises infrastructure to meet regulatory and compliance requirements such as data localization. You can read the details of the AWS announcement including which services Dedicated Local Zones will support, here: Announcing AWS Dedicated Local Zones (amazon.com).

Microsoft Azure offers a choice of relational and non-relational database services to support a wide range of application needs and demands. Built-in intelligence helps automate management tasks like high availability, scaling, and query performance tuning to provide users with services that ensure applications are always available and performant. Many services offer essentially limitless database scale and SLAs (Service Level Agreements) usually range between 99.9-99.999% availability.

What is the hidden potential of OpenTelemetry? It goes a lot further than the (awesome) application of tracing and monitoring your software. The OpenTelemetry project is an attempt to standardize how performance is reported and how trace data is passed around your microservice architecture. This context propagation is a superpower for those who adopt OpenTelemetry tracing.

Both Jaeger and Prometheus are popular open-source application performance monitoring tools. While Jaeger is an end-to-end distributed tracing tool, Prometheus is used as a time-series database for monitoring metrics. Let's dive in to explore their key features and differences. Application performance monitoring is the key to keep your system's health in check. In today's digital economy, no business can afford to have failed or delayed completion of user requests.