Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Long before ORMs, LINQ, and high-level abstractions became common in the.NET ecosystem, there was ADO.NET—raw, fast, and unapologetically hands-on. It was the original data access layer for developers who wanted complete control. And two decades later, it’s still the tool of choice when performance, precision, and transparency matter most. But how does it deliver that control?

In our post, 9 Continuous Delivery Tools For Reliable Releases, we explored why continuous delivery is critical to building robust development pipelines — and how it helps teams deliver customer value while boosting the bottom line. Today, we’re diving into the next evolution of that pipeline: continuous deployment. Today’s technology companies need to release quality features quickly and put them in users’ hands even quicker.

VPC Flow Logs come with a default format that gives you basic network traffic details. But you can tweak the format to capture exactly what you need. This can lower costs, speed up processing, and make your logs fit better with what you’re trying to monitor. If you want to improve security, keep an eye on performance, or save money, adjusting your VPC logs can make a big difference. Let’s take a look at some practical ways to customize your logs beyond the default settings.

Prometheus is supposed to help you monitor your stack, not become the thing you need to monitor. But if you’ve ever seen it spike in CPU and slow everything down, you know that’s not always the case. High Prometheus CPU usage usually shows up when you're scraping too many metrics, using expensive queries, or running with default configs that don’t fit your workload. This guide covers how to track Prometheus CPU usage, what typically causes it, and how to fix it.

Containers have been with us for a while and are ubiquitous in the Secure Software Development Life Cycle (SSDLC). According to some reports, nearly 60% of organizations use containers for most or all of their production applications. It’s no surprise really, as containers provide consistency and standardization across the lifecycle while speeding up delivery pipelines. They revolutionized how we develop and deploy apps in the cloud and there is no sign of this changing anytime soon.

Once upon a time in the world of metrics, Wavefront was a pioneer. Before Prometheus took over and tools like OpenTelemetry unified tracing and metrics, Wavefront brought something novel to the table: human-readable metrics with real-time querying and tag-based dimensionality. In enterprise environments running VMware or early microservices, it offered a scalable way to understand a system's behavior. But as the telemetry landscape evolved, many systems that spoke Wavefront were left behind.

Most CircleCI pipelines are configured to trigger automatically on code commits, but not every development scenario fits that model. Sometimes you need to trigger a build manually—to test pipeline changes, retry a flaky test, or run CI on a colleague’s branch—without the friction of pushing empty commits or navigating to the UI to manually trigger a build.