Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

This month, I celebrate 11 years of working on SQL Sentry. I started as employee number 15 at SentryOne and then moved through various roles in support, customer success, and professional services to my current role as product manager. In an industry where innovation and adaptation are key, the journey of SQL Sentry and its team has been remarkable. SQL Sentry has come a long way since its early days.

Sometimes, two concepts overlap so much that it’s hard to view them in isolation. Today, incident management and problem management fit this description to a tee. This wasn’t always the case. For a long time, these two ITIL concepts were seen as distinct—with specialized roles overseeing each. Incident management existed in one corner and problem management in the other. Then came the DevOps movement and the lines suddenly became blurred. So where do they stand today?

Incident management is a critical aspect of IT service management (ITSM) that revolves around restoring normal service operations as swiftly as possible after an unplanned interruption or reduction in quality. Also referred to as “incidents,” these interruptions could range from a minor issue like a single user being unable to access a service to a significant problem such as a server crash or network outage affecting many users.

In this article, we will be covering how to monitor Kubernetes using Graphite, and we’ll do the visualization with Grafana. The focus will be on monitoring and plotting essential metrics for monitoring Kubernetes clusters. We will download, implement and monitor custom dashboards for Kubernetes that can be downloaded from the Grafana dashboard resources. These dashboards have variables to allow drilling down into the data at a granular level.

Prometheus is becoming a popular tool for monitoring Python applications despite the fact that it was originally designed for single-process multi-threaded applications, rather than multi-process. Prometheus was developed in the Soundcloud environment and was inspired by Google’s Borgmon. In its original environment, Borgmon relies on straightforward methods of service discovery - where Borg can easily find all jobs running on a cluster.

Before we jump into the specifics of Grafana and Datadog, let's look at the main comparison points. Grafana is a great dashboard that allows you to plug in essentially any data source in the world. Grafana is most commonly paired with Prometheus, Graphite, and Elasticsearch to provide a full APM, time-series, and logs monitoring stack.

Wondering why you’re hearing about SaaS spend management more and more lately? These days, SaaS apps are everywhere, and adoption is still growing at an impressive rate. Gartner projects that SaaS spending will grow over 17% in 2024, with the market exceeding $232 billion. Unfortunately, much of that spend is wasted on zombie apps, overlapping software offerings, as well as under-utilized and over-provisioned licenses.

Implement the enterprise service management approach to revolutionize how your organization delivers services beyond IT.

Top tips is a weekly column where we highlight what’s trending in the tech world today and list out ways to explore these trends. This week we’re looking at five ways ways you can build upon the basics and start incorporating AI in your everyday. AI technology is now utilized in some form by almost 77% of devices. Nearly every industry has incorporated, or is trying to incorporate, AI in some way or another.

Hey folks! We‘re back with another nifty feature to your Incident Management tool arsenal. You now have the ability to merge incidents with a few clicks! With this latest update you can reduce the noise while dealing with a complex incident by merging incidents across services under a parent incident. Typically this can occur when multiple incidents stem from the same underlying issue or root cause.