Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Choosing the wrong metric type in Prometheus can lead to inaccurate dashboards, false positives in alerting, and missed indicators of system failure. Gauge metrics are intended for tracking values that can go up and down, such as memory usage, queue depth, or the number of active connections. Unlike counters, which only increment (or reset on restart), gauges reflect the current state of a resource at scrape time.

The Prometheus CloudWatch exporter pulls AWS CloudWatch metrics into your Prometheus setup, giving you a unified view of your infrastructure alongside application metrics. If you're already running Prometheus and need visibility into AWS services like EC2, RDS, or Lambda, this exporter handles the integration without forcing you to switch monitoring stacks.

Message queues quietly take care of a lot—buffering workloads, smoothing traffic spikes, and keeping services connected. But they don’t always get much attention until something feels off. Amazon SQS offers a solid set of metrics to help you understand how your queues are doing, whether you’re scaling well or nearing limits. This blog breaks down the key SQS metrics: where to find them, what they mean, and how to respond when things start to shift.

Your Node.js app runs fine on your machine. But inside Docker? You start getting weird crashes—ENOSPC: no space left on device. Chrome headless tests fail out of nowhere. PostgreSQL throws shared memory errors under load. The problem? It’s probably /dev/shm, the shared memory volume Docker sets up by default. Most containers get just 64MB of space here.

Your checkout API just started throwing 500s during peak traffic. You SSH into production, tail logs across six microservices, and realize the database timeout buried in service's logs is causing cascade failures. Two hours later, you've fixed it, but you're thinking: "There has to be a better way." There is. Log monitoring tools centralize logs from your entire stack, making debugging systematic instead of archaeological.

Running apps in production? You need visibility fast. Traditional logging gives you scattered events. Prometheus gives you structured, queryable data that scales. In this guide, we’ll break down how to use Prometheus for logging-style observability, where it fits in your stack, and how to plug it into tools like Grafana or your cloud-native setup.

When a container starts consuming excessive memory or becomes unresponsive, you need a way to shut it down. The two primary options — docker stop and docker kill,both terminate containers, but they operate differently and have different implications. The key difference: docker stop sends SIGTERM for a graceful shutdown, then escalates to SIGKILL if the process doesn’t exit in time. docker kill skips straight to SIGKILL, terminating the container immediately.

Your server's been logging everything—it’s just easy to overlook until something breaks. Every incoming request, database call, or auth check ends up in your access logs. They’re not flashy, but they quietly document every interaction your system handles. For developers, they’re often the most reliable starting point when things go wrong. In this blog, we'll take a look at what an access log is, its format, types, and a few best practices.

When troubleshooting with the Elastic Stack, Kibana is often the interface you’ll rely on to query and visualize logs. It doesn’t change the data—it just makes it searchable and a bit easier to work with under pressure. If you’re investigating an outage, tracking performance issues, or trying to correlate events across services, Kibana’s log exploration tools can speed up the process, assuming they’re configured and used well.

Sometimes your API call takes a few seconds longer than expected. Or users start reporting slow page loads. One of the most common reasons? Network latency.

If your users are spread across the globe but your servers are sitting in Virginia, you’ll probably hear complaints about slow load times, especially from places like Australia. CDNs fix this by caching static assets closer to where your users are. Azure CDN does exactly that, and it fits well if you're already using Azure services. You can hook it up to Blob Storage, App Services, or your origin. This guide covers how to set it up, what to expect, and how to know it’s working.

Your code passes locally, CI is green, and the deploy goes through. Then production throws a 500, and the trace isn’t helpful. And here, event logs help. A log captures timestamped records of what the app did HTTP requests, DB queries, cache misses, retries, failures. These entries give you enough context to debug without reproducing the issue locally. Especially when dealing with distributed systems, logs are often the only consistent source of truth.

Collecting logs in Kubernetes often starts as a simple goal, and quickly turns into a game of “where did that log line go?” Between sidecars, DaemonSets, and countless config options, it’s easy to get lost. Fluent Bit helps cut through the noise. It's fast, lightweight, and plays well with Kubernetes. And when you deploy it using Helm charts? The setup becomes way more manageable. This guide covers the how and the why, without overcomplicating the what.

Code in production will break. Maybe a request takes too long, maybe it fails quietly, or maybe it works fine one minute and falls over the next. Logs can help, sure—but they don’t always show the full picture, especially when performance issues are involved. Elastic APM gives you a clearer view. It traces what your application is doing from incoming requests to database queries and everything in between.

Your Kafka producer pushed a million messages yesterday. Nice. But can you tell if they all made it? Or why did latency spike at 2 PM? Producer metrics help you determine that. They expose how long messages take to send, whether messages are getting stuck, and whether retries are piling up. Let’s go over which ones help while debugging and how to monitor them.

Pulling observability data together is rarely clean. Metrics come from everywhere, formats vary, and making sense of it takes some work. OpenTelemetry Collector and Prometheus fit perfectly here. The Collector handles ingestion and processing from different sources, while Prometheus stores and queries the data. Simple, effective, and no vendor lock-in. In this blog, we cover how to integrate the Collector with Prometheus, common pitfalls, and ways to control costs.

Linux log files are text-based records that capture system events, application activities, and user actions. They're stored primarily in the /var/log directory and provide essential information for debugging issues, monitoring system health, and maintaining security. This guide covers the most important Linux log files and a few detailed techniques for reading and analyzing them.

Prometheus can be lightweight to start with, but once it’s in production, storage usage tends to grow faster than expected. Managing how long data is kept becomes critical, especially when you're working with limited disk space or tight budgets. This guide outlines the key concepts behind Prometheus data retention, how to configure it effectively, and what to watch out for.

When your Docker container isn't behaving the way you expect, you need to get inside and see what's going on. Maybe your app is throwing errors, a service won't start, or you just need to check some configuration files. Getting into a running Docker container is simpler than you might think, but there are several ways to do it depending on your situation. This guide shows you exactly how to log into Docker containers, troubleshoot common issues, and debug your applications effectively.

Your app logs start simple—maybe a few print() or logging.info() calls. But in production, things get noisy. Thousands of log lines per minute, scattered across services, and it’s hard to know what matters. This is when tools like Graylog and the ELK stack help. They let you collect, search, and make sense of logs, but they do it in different ways. This guide breaks down how each one handles setup, scale, and day-to-day use.

It’s late, you get an alert, and Grafana is down. The reason? It ran out of memory. If you’ve ever watched Grafana slowly eat up RAM until it just stops responding, you know how frustrating that can be. Memory can spike quickly, especially with complex dashboards and multiple data sources. This guide will help you understand what’s going on and how to keep Grafana running without surprises.

Everything looks fine—dashboards are green, logs are quiet. But users start reporting slow response times. No errors, no traffic spikes. Just a general slowdown. It’s a common situation. Not all problems show up as crashes or clear failures. Sometimes, performance degrades quietly, and standard metrics don’t catch it early. But that's where Prometheus alerting can help, if you're monitoring the right signals.

When requests slow down across your microservices, tracing helps you understand where time is spent. Jaeger and Zipkin are two popular tools for distributed tracing, built to answer a simple question: where did the request go? If you're choosing between them or just exploring options, this guide breaks down the differences and when each one might be a better fit.