Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

History is everywhere at Dartmouth College, and while the campus is steeped in tradition, its IT infrastructure can’t afford to get stuck in the past. In an institution where world-class research and undergraduate studies intersect, technology must be fast, invisible, and – above all – reliable. That reliability was put to the test when Dartmouth’s load balancing vendor was acquired twice in five years, as Avi Networks moved to VMware and VMware moved to Broadcom.

The hardest part of modern infrastructure isn’t choosing your deployment environments — it’s bridging communication between them. Large enterprises are constantly facing the challenge of keeping everything connected, secure, and fast when their infrastructures are spread across different clouds and on-premises systems.

Connecting nearly a billion professionals is no small feat. It requires an infrastructure that puts the user experience above everything else. At LinkedIn, this principle created a massive engineering challenge: delivering a fast, consistent experience across various use cases, from the social feed to real-time messaging and enterprise tools.

When your active time series is in the billions and the total number of data points you need to monitor runs into the tens of trillions, you need a high-performance observability solution with operational simplicity. Streaming behemoth Spotify is one such case. Their observability team chose VictoriaMetrics as the fastest monitoring and observability solution on the market.

AI agents are fundamentally different beasts to monitor compared to traditional applications. A single user request can trigger a cascade of 10+ internal operations: sub-agent transfers, tool executions, LLM calls, API requests, each with unpredictable latency and failure modes. When something goes wrong (and with LLMs, things go wrong in creative ways), you need to see the entire execution flow to debug effectively.

One of the most anticipated presentations at HAProxyConf 2025 came from gaming and user-generated content (UGC) innovators Roblox. Software Engineer Chris Jones and Senior Site Reliability Engineer Ben Meidel gave an enthusiastic and enjoyable presentation, detailing their journey from legacy hardware to a sophisticated, automated, and secure application delivery platform, with seamless, API-powered dynamic configuration and upgrades, supported by the HAProxy Enterprise Dynamic Update Module.