Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

You’ve built something amazing. Your services are scaling, your users are happy, and your team is shipping code like never before. Then the cloud bill arrives, and one line item makes your eyes water: observability. That Datadog invoice feels less like a utility bill and more like a ransom note. It’s a modern engineering paradox. The tools that give you sight into your complex systems are the same ones that can blind you with runaway costs.

For more than a decade, Cookpad, a global platform for recipe sharing and search, has relied on APM tools to monitor critical application performance metrics, like server response times and resource usage. When their previous APM tool became too expensive after price increases, they needed to find a new solution that could check all of their boxes.

Discover how to use flow data to pinpoint your most valuable traffic, identify missing peer opportunities, and make smarter peering choices across your internet exchanges. In previous peering blogs, we’ve shared how you can maximize the value of your connection to an IX by peering with the IX route servers, and identify and contact specific peers via bilateral sessions.

A public status page forms the public face of your organization's service availability. It is the first point of contact for your customers to check the status of your services during times of crisis. Hence, ensuring the credibility and uptime of your public status page is crucial to your organization's reputation. In this article we will look at the key mistakes to avoid while hosting and managing a public status page.

As a network admin, you're probably all too familiar with the importance of your network switches. These devices keep the heart of your network beating by connecting various devices, from computers to printers, and ensuring data flows smoothly. However, switches, like any hardware, come with their own set of issues that can disrupt productivity and cause headaches if not addressed promptly.

GitLab’s audit logs offer a goldmine of insights into user activity, project changes, and security events. Getting that data into Graylog for centralized analysis is easier than you might think—especially with the flexibility of our Raw HTTP input and Illuminate’s GitLab Spotlight Pack. In this two-part guide, we’ll walk you through how to get it done, from wiring up GitLab’s Audit Event Streaming to visualizing enriched events in a purpose-built dashboard.

AI is being used to automate just about everything these days, from writing code to making coffee. Observability is no exception. But before we dive into how AI can actually help, it is worth stepping back to look at what already works, what does not, and where the real gaps are.

For decades, the corporate network has been the central nervous system of the enterprise. It’s the invisible, indispensable fabric that connects everything. And for just as long, the conversation has been about its growing complexity. But today, something feels different. You are no longer dealing with a predictable, manageable evolution. Instead, three immense, converging forces are creating a perfect storm, pushing traditional network management approaches to their breaking point.

We consistently roll out helpful updates and fun features in Grafana Cloud, our fully managed observability platform powered by the open source Grafana LGTM Stack: Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics. In case you missed them, here’s our monthly round-up of the latest and greatest updates in Grafana Cloud. You can also check out our What’s new in Grafana Cloud documentation to explore all the latest features. Not a Grafana Cloud user yet?

More than 10 years ago, StatusGator pioneered the concept of a status page aggregator. How was the StatusGator name created? In a group chat, of course! The incubator of crazy ideas and nerdy discussions, our friendly group chat was a place where I originally discussed the product idea, validated its use cases, and solicited feedback on name concepts. I recently unearthed screenshots from the original group chat among my friends.