Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Freshping has announced that it will retire its service on March 6, prompting many organizations to reassess how they maintain uptime visibility. When monitoring stops, it doesn't mean your issues stop too; it’s a period of forced blindness. This sunsetting period exposes a core vulnerability: Digital visibility is only as strong as the platform supporting it.

Most database problems get blamed on queries, schemas, or infrastructure, and rarely on SQL Server ODBC drivers. Fair enough, those components often break. But in many cases, the real culprit is the connection layer itself. Poor drivers can lead to security gaps, performance hits, cloud connection struggles, Unicode issues, or incompatibility across platforms and modern SQL Server versions.

Compare 9 incident management tools: PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Incident.io, Rootly, FireHydrant, BetterStack, Grafana OnCall, Squadcast, and Last9. Features, pricing, and which fits your team. Product Marketing Manager.

AI coding assistants like Gemini are changing how developers write code. They can generate entire functions, debug tricky issues, and help you move faster than ever before. But with that speed comes a new challenge: how do you make sure AI-generated code actually works? AI assistants are powerful, but they’re not perfect. They can introduce subtle bugs, miss edge cases, or generate code that breaks existing functionality. That’s where CI (continuous integration) comes in.

Observability data arrives as a flood of signals, full of potential, but rarely consistent. Error messages and debug logs can reveal what businesses care about: reliability, customer experience, and revenue. The challenge is turning raw technical events into information the whole organization can act on. Many observability systems store data first and structure it later, forcing teams to rebuild context in dashboards and queries, often duplicating logic across services.

Most companies rewired how their people work, not once but twice. First for remote, then for RTO (Return to Office). Their network monitoring never caught up. So, what happened? IT teams are managing a network that spans headquarters, branch offices, home setups, and cloud apps with tools that still assume everyone's connecting back to one place. When something breaks (and it will), nobody can pinpoint where. IT takes the blame. Users lose productivity. Leadership loses patience.

AI-powered coding tools are changing how developers work. Tools like Claude Code can write functions, refactor code, and build features through natural conversation, often faster than you could type them yourself. But speed creates its own risks. AI-generated code can contain subtle bugs, reference packages that don’t exist, or misuse APIs in ways that only surface at runtime. That’s where continuous integration comes in. CI is a safety net that lets you move fast confidently.

At Aiven, we use and contribute to open source to build our managed data platform. In the early days of Aiven for PostgreSQL, robust cloud-native tools for high availability and streaming backups did not exist at the level we needed. So we built our own. We created pglookout to monitor replication and handle failovers, and we built pghoard for backup and restore using object storage. These tools served us and thousands of our customers well for years. But the open-source PostgreSQL ecosystem has grown.