Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Top tips is a weekly column where we highlight what’s trending in the tech world and list ways to explore these trends. This week, we’re looking at how to keep your cool when everything lands on your desk with an ASAP tag. There’s always that day at work. Meetings stacked back-to-back, emails piling faster than you can open them, and just when you think you’ve got a handle on things, your boss drops the golden line: Can you get this done today?

Good news – Early Warning Signals are now available in Google Chat! This means you’ll get real-time alerts about possible outages—before providers officially acknowledge them—delivered right where your team is already chatting and collaborating.

Collecting Windows Security Events has always been a necessary but difficult job. Traditional methods depend on third-party collectors that must be installed, configured, and constantly maintained. They break, they lag behind updates, and they create unnecessary operational work. At the same time, they often flood Microsoft Sentinel with redundant or irrelevant data, driving up costs and slowing down investigations.

Jira is an industry favorite when it comes to managing software projects, yet its native dashboards can sometimes leave teams wanting more insight. The default views give a general update, but often lack the connection to the day-to-day activity happening in other parts of your workflow. As organizations use a wide mix of modern tools – from code repositories and cloud services to spreadsheets and reporting apps, it’s easy for critical details to get scattered or overlooked.

Today’s enterprises don’t run on singular self-contained systems—they’re intricate webs of interdependence: cloud services, APIs, CI/CD tools, DNS, CDNs, SASE vendors, identity management providers, cloud interconnects, ISPs, SaaS applications, application components, microservices, etc. A recent industry survey found that 84% of organizations suffered operational disruption from third-party risk incidents, with 66% facing adverse financial impact.

Using IAR Embedded Workbench for Arm with an IAR I-jet probe? Did you know this provides an excellent data channel for Tracealyzer trace streaming? We have just updated Percepio Application Note PA-023 with a simpler setup for trace streaming over ITM/SWO, enabled by improvements in IAR’s ITM logging support. This makes it easier than ever to combine IAR’s powerful debugging with Tracealyzer’s RTOS-level insight. Read the updated guide here.

Anthropic’s Claude is one of the most powerful and developer-friendly large language models (LLMs) available. But as usage grows, so does cost. Here’s the reality: A single unoptimized development loop or unmonitored QA job can multiply costs 10x overnight. Most teams experimenting with Claude lack the visibility and guardrails needed to prevent runaway costs, especially once usage moves from R&D into production.

Comma-separated value (CSV) files are one of the simplest formats for structured data and remain widely used across industries. From machine exports to business reports, CSVs are easy to create, edit, and share. They serve as a backbone for data management, ensuring teams can exchange information quickly and consistently. However, CSVs alone are static. When ingested into a time series database, they shift from flat files to part of a living data pipeline.

Database monitoring transforms from a reactive troubleshooting exercise into a proactive optimization strategy when you have the right tools and approaches in place. This blog shares practical ways to choose monitoring solutions, set up observability for different database platforms, and design workflows that scale in modern distributed systems.