Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

NIS2 (Network and Information Security Directive 2) is the European Union’s updated cybersecurity directive, replacing the original NIS Directive (2016), often referenced to as NIS1. NIS2 was adopted in December 2022 and the deadline for implementation by EU member states was October 17, 2024. NIS2 strengthens cybersecurity requirements across essential and important sectors to enhance cyber resilience and response capabilities.

AI and automation have cemented themselves as pillars of enterprise operations. Both have brought measurable benefits to organizations: efficiency gains, streamlined operations, and new revenue opportunities, to name a few. And with new capabilities like agentic AI bursting onto the scene, AI and automation will only become more impactful in the coming years. But accompanying these new capabilities are new complexities, and they’re evolving just as fast as the technologies themselves.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has arrived in the workplace, powering everything from the personalization of tailored experiences, to automation, to predictive analytics, all for the purpose of better decision making. No longer a buzzword tossed around in boardroom brainstorming or futuristic planning sessions, AI is a present-day reality reshaping how businesses operate. Generative AI kicked off the revolution, and its rapid adoption is changing how humans create and work.

Microsoft’s recent trials of Co-Pilot Vision are paving the way for Agentic AI, a proactive and context-aware assistant that can enhance productivity by intelligently responding to user needs. By having visibility into what you’re working on, such AI can anticipate tasks, offer relevant suggestions, and reduce the friction of daily workflows. However, history has shown us that AI assistance, if not executed correctly, can become more of a nuisance than an asset.

InfluxDB is a powerful open-source time-series database widely used for monitoring system performance, IoT metrics, and application telemetry. With SquaredUp's InfluxDB plugin, you can effortlessly visualize and monitor your InfluxDB data, gaining real-time insights into your metrics alongside your other tools and services. This guide will walk you through connecting InfluxDB with SquaredUp, creating dashboards, setting up monitoring, and sharing your visualizations.

On the March episode of This Month in Datadog, Jeremy Garcia (VP of Technical Community and Open Source) covers Attacker Clustering, Auto Test Retries, and new Observability Pipelines features, including keyword dictionaries and several integrations. Later in the episode, Jinwu Liu (Product Manager) spotlights Reference Tables, which is now generally available, and Yash Kumar (Product Lead, Cloud SIEM) shows how these tables can be used to add context to detection rules in Cloud SIEM.

Real problems need real solutions. We’ve all heard the same lofty claims about AI in IT operations: “Reduce alert noise” and “Detect anomalies.” While these sound great on paper, they often fall flat when critical systems fail during peak buying seasons or a major security threat goes undetected.

A benchmark can be interpreted as a standard of comparison used to assess something. In everyday life, for example, when we want to buy a new cellphone and want to know which one is faster, we can see the speed test (benchmark) by measuring how fast the cellphone opens applications or runs games. From there, we can compare which cellphone is better based on the numbers produced.

The amount of traffic handled by AI systems can’t be overstated. Over half of all organizations in India, the UAE, Singapore, and China use AI, and traffic from generative AI sources jumped by 1,200% since July 2024. While demand for AI-powered workloads is steadily increasing overall, traffic to individual AI providers is much more unpredictable. User demand spikes and wanes unexpectedly, but like any service, users expect you to always be available and responsive.

Every engineering leader knows the stress of an upcoming seasonal spike. Whether it’s tax season, open enrollment, or Black Friday, there’s always that moment where someone says, “Are we actually ready?” It’s usually followed by a scramble: auditing services, chasing down owners, updating spreadsheets, running perf tests, checking alerting thresholds, verifying infra configs—much of it manual, fragmented, and slightly different every time. It’s exhausting.