Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

With the influx of AI tooling, it’s never been easier to contribute to open source communities. These tools are capable of gathering context quickly, “understanding” repositories faster than ever before. They provide instant summaries about repositories that, previously, would have meant reading lines and lines of code. They can fix bugs in programming languages you don’t know, and ultimately allow more contributors to get involved, which (almost) every open source project wants.

Getting the most out of Whisker requires understanding its inner workings and this guide is designed to help you master this exciting tool with support from the Calico community. We’ve compiled the most frequently asked questions from our community Slack, support conversations, and CalicoCon sessions. This Q&A covers everything from initial installation tips and version requirements to advanced topics like filtering flow logs and integrating with Goldmane, the powerful API that underpins Whisker.

AI assistants like Cursor and GitHub Copilot are fun to play with. They autocomplete code, refactor functions, and occasionally argue with you about whether you really needed that semicolon. But the moment you ask them to do something grounded in your repo, say, “start work on JIRA-123”… you hit a wall. They don’t know your branching conventions. They don’t know how your team links issues.

Managed Service Providers (MSPs) live and die by their data. Externally, clients expect clear reporting, fast responses, and visible proof of value. Internally, smooth operations and low overheads are essential to business success. But with so many tools, key data is scattered across multiple systems – PSA, RMM, cloud services, ticketing, monitoring, finance – and that causes blind spots. Dashboards fix this problem by consolidating data into a single view.

Have you ever been in a situation where know your team is going to run their weekly maintenance window and you silence your notifications to prevent a flood of false positives from pinging your inbox? If you are associated with a team that uses any type of alert system, you know how easily alert fatigue can happen. The incessant and unpredictable (or even, at times, predictable) pings, emails, and notification alerts can drive even the most serene worker totally batty.

Cloud costs don’t wait for your finance team to catch up. They spike on product launches, dip when usage slows, and sometimes blow past forecasts overnight. Every container spun up, every gigabyte stored, and every terabyte transferred adds to the tab. The main culprit is often variable costs. In this guide, we’ll break down how variable costs affect budgeting and the strategies you can use to turn cost variability into a competitive advantage.

Providing continuous, high-quality care takes more than clinical expertise—it depends on well-designed physician on call schedules that balance patient safety, physician wellness, and operational efficiency. Whether you manage a residency program or a multi-specialty group, creating an effective physician call schedule—or a broader provider on call schedule—is critical for 24/7 coverage and clinician well-being.

Why wait for the next poll? An SNMP trap is a real-time alert sent from a device to a monitoring system, without waiting for polling. Ever had a router die silently at 3 AM while your monitoring system was still polling away every 5 minutes? Yeah… not fun. That’s where SNMP traps step in. Think of them as the push notifications of network monitoring: instant, lightweight, and sometimes misunderstood.

Scaling workstation deployments is never straightforward. IT teams need to balance performance, cost, manageability, and security, but the trade-offs between approaches can be significant. In this blog, we’ll walk through the three most common deployment models, highlight their limitations, and introduce how newer solutions like Computle illustrate a different path.

To effectively manage modern applications, you need to understand how they work on the inside. Distributed tracing is the key to this, providing a detailed picture of a request's journey across every service. OpenTelemetry has emerged as the industry-standard framework for implementing tracing and achieving true observability in complex, distributed systems. In this article, we embark on a journey to explore the core concept of context propagation within Open Telemetry.