Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

If you’re looking for a dashboarding solution today, chances are you’ve looked at Grafana or SquaredUp — or both. Grafana is a popular open source dashboarding tool with on-prem and cloud variants, while SquaredUp is the SaaS, cloud-based unified dashboarding solution. Both offer a comprehensive list of data sources that they can plug into and build dashboards. As such, they both also offer an integration with Azure - which is the focus of our discussion today.

You run Lighthouse and it tells you your Speed Index is bad. But the page looks like it loads fine. You see stuff on screen early. So why is Lighthouse acting like your site is a sloth? Speed Index is a “how fast does this page visually fill in” metric. Not “when did the first pixel show up” (that’s FCP) and not “when did the main content show up” (That’s LCP). It’s the whole above-the-fold loading experience, averaged over time.

IT teams are being held hostage in the return-to-office debate. They didn't even get a seat at the table. And if you're not at the table, you're on the menu. The job market has cooled dramatically. Canada's unemployment rate hit 7.1% in August 2025, which is the highest since May 2016, excluding pandemic years. Employers noticed. And the RTO mandates started rolling out fast: The debate is heating up. Employees don't want to give up remote work. Executives want people in the office seats.