Running Apache Kafka in production? You know monitoring is a must. But with all those metrics coming at you, it’s easy to get lost in the weeds. After a while, you start to figure out that monitoring everything isn’t really worth it. It’s about focusing on a few key metrics that give you the biggest bang for your buck. Here’s a breakdown of the most important Kafka performance metrics to keep your eye on.

Intelligent Automation (IA) is the next-generation technology that combines Robotic Process Automation with Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing. While traditional automation handles repetitive, rule-based tasks, IA takes it a step ahead by enabling systems to learn, adapt, and make real-time decisions.

Doug Tidwell is the Director of Content at Altinity, responsible for creating useful content for ClickHouse users in general and Altinity customers in particular. He has more than 30 years of experience in databases, CI/CD systems, development tools, and middleware. When it comes to visualizing, monitoring, and logging ClickHouse clusters, there’s no easier way to accomplish all three than with Grafana Cloud, the open and composable observability stack powered by open source.

The OpenTelemetry (OTel) project offers numerous components and instrumentations that support different languages and telemetry signals. However, this flexibility can be overwhelming, and new users often struggle to choose the right components and configure them properly for their specific use cases. To address this, OpenTelemetry defines the concept of a distribution, a tailored and customized version of OpenTelemetry components.

Voice over IP, or VoIP for short, revolutionized telephony. Phones based upon old PBX-style switching and old-fashioned telephone wires are rare. Networks, the Internet and the IP protocol changed everything. Years, in fact, decades ago when Voice over IP started, the economics were astounding and the flexibility amazing. Sadly, the voice quality was often atrocious, which is a no can do for businesses of any sort. As network speed grew and voice technology improved, call quality improved.

Innovation in automation is transforming what’s possible in operational dynamics at an unprecedented pace. For modern enterprises, this shift is not just a technological evolution; it’s a strategic imperative. C-suite executives and boardrooms increasingly recognize the potential of technologies like GenAI as powerful tools for enhancing productivity, reducing risk, and optimizing costs.

Managing IT operations in today's digital workplace is increasingly complex. The lack of visibility, the intricacies of modern systems, the rise of remote work, and the consumerization of applications all contribute to the challenges faced by IT teams. According to Gartner, 56% of IT leaders cite budget restrictions, 51% mention internal resistance to change, and 44% highlight talent issues as significant obstacles.

Prometheus has emerged as the de facto standard for monitoring in cloud-native environments based on several key factors. Prometheus offers a highly scalable time-series database, capable of handling millions of metrics and a pull-based architecture that simplifies network configuration and enhances security. In this blog post, we’ll explore the four primary Prometheus metric types: counter, gauge, histogram, and summary.

SHARE For Managed Service Providers (MSPs), handling multiple clients’ IT environments means handling vast amounts of sensitive data, critical systems, and privileged access. Role-based access control (RBAC) is essential for data security and customer confidence to ensure that only the right people can gain access to sensitive information.

We recently adjusted how we handle “partial writes” with our InfluxDB Cloud Serverless product using the v2 Write API. This only applies to InfluxDB Cloud Serverless customers (those who created their Cloud accounts after January 31, 2023). In the near future, we will make this change for InfluxDB Cloud Dedicated and InfluxDB Clustered customers as well.