Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Data is the lifeblood of modern organizations. Since data helps teams make better decisions and provide a competitive edge, it’s also a target of bad actors looking to steal sensitive information or launch ransomware attacks. From software vulnerabilities and weak authentication mechanisms to malware and inadequate access controls, there’s no shortage of ways for hackers to infiltrate networks and gain access to mission-critical data.

Over the past five years, software and systems have become increasingly complex and challenging for teams to understand. A challenging macroeconomic environment, the rise of generative AI, and further advancements in cloud computing compound the problems faced by many organizations. Simply understanding what’s broken is difficult enough, but trying to do so while balancing the need to constantly innovate and ship makes the problem worse.

In the digital realm, incidents such as service disruptions and security breaches are inevitable. Incidents affect your customers and stakeholders. Also, incidents pose significant challenges to IT, Ops, DevOps, and customer support teams. As we increasingly depend on digital tools and services, the demand for seamless performance escalates, highlighting the importance of effective incident communication.

In an era dominated by digital advancements, cybersecurity has become the cornerstone of technological integrity and trust. The pivotal role of cybersecurity in today’s digital landscape is exemplified by the exponential rise in cyber threats—ranging from ransomware to sophisticated phishing attacks—that demand increasingly robust defensive mechanisms.

Failures and bugs are all too common during software deployment, even with the best development teams. Following software deployment best practices helps you increase efficiency, improve security, and bring products to market faster. This article combines the seven most valuable practices your team can start implementing today.

In this post, I’m going to point out some of the opportunities you have in front of you not only because you now have Kentik NMS up and running, but more importantly, as a result of all the hard work you did to get here.

If you know me, you know I care about fast code. Recently, I ran a simple query that revealed that we spend almost $160k a year on one task. Luckily, we launched the Metrics beta back in March. Over the last month or so, 10 of us Sentry engineers collaborated across many functions to leverage Metrics to track custom data points and pinpoint the issue leading to this ridiculous ingestion cost.

As an SRE, analyzing applications is more complex than ever. Not only do you have to ensure the application is running optimally to ensure great customer experiences, but you must also understand the inner workings in some cases to help troubleshoot. Analyzing issues in a production-based service is a team sport. It takes the SRE, DevOps, development, and support to get to the root cause and potentially remediate. If it's impacting, then it's even worse because there is a race against time.

Resilience in today’s liquid business environment demands flexibility. The term “observability” replaces monitoring, reflecting the need to adapt and be agile in the face of challenges. The key is to dissolve operations into the cloud, integrating tools and operational expertise for effective resilience. I remember that when I started my professional career (in a bank) one of the first tasks I was handled was to secure an email server exposed to the internet.

Are you using the Azure metrics exporter to ship telemetry data to Grafana Cloud? Are you overwhelmed with the amount of configuration and complexity necessary to avoid being rate limited? Well, did you know that with Grafana Alloy, our distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector with built-in Prometheus pipelines and support for metrics, logs, traces, and profiles, you can now: Let’s look at how these two features can reduce the complexity of your Alloy configuration.