Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Shadow IT is a term used to describe IT systems, applications, or services that are used within an organization without the explicit approval, knowledge, or oversight of the IT department or the organization’s management. It typically arises when employees or departments adopt and use software, hardware, or cloud services for their specific needs without going through the official IT procurement or security processes.

”Isn’t Observability something for Ops to worry about?” I’ve heard this response more than once when talking about how developers should learn OpenTelemetry. I wanted to write this piece to show you how important and how easy it is to learn observability from day one as a coder.

As organisations strive to deliver seamless user experiences, maximise operational efficiency, and maintain a competitive edge, the need for comprehensive Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools becomes increasingly evident. APM tools offer invaluable insights into the performance and behaviour of applications in real-time. They go further than the conventional monitoring approach by providing a holistic view of the entire stack, encompassing servers, databases and user interactions.

Everyone talks about the need for observability, it even comes up in board meetings. But let’s talk about the reasons you shouldn’t add observability to production.

Application performance monitoring (APM) tools have become a fundamental part of many organisations that wish to track and observe the optimal functioning of their web-based applications. These tools serve to greatly simplify the process through automation and allow teams to effectively collaborate to maximize efficiency, enabling you to reach the root cause of an issue before it reaches your customers.

My favorite technical experience from grad school was all the cool ways we were trying to squeeze every last bit of performance out of the IBM JVM (now called Eclipse OMR). The majority of such optimizations required an intricate understanding of how CPUs and memories look under the hood. But why is there such an impressive performance gain in padding objects with blank space to the closest multiple of 64 bytes and ensuring they always start at addresses that are exactly divisible with 64?

As connected as the world is today, it can feel quite disconnected, especially in IT. Individual teams use various tools, each with specialized interfaces and dedicated dashboards, to present or interpret data each the specific functional team needs.

Loki is a open source log aggregation tool developed by Grafana labs. It is inspired by Prometheus and is designed to be cost-effective and easy to operate. But Loki also has some limitations, and you might want to explore some Loki alternatives for your log analytics. In this article, we will look at 11 log management tools you can use as a Loki alternative. Loki is designed to keep indexing low. It does this by making use of labels.