Ensuring optimal application performance is a Herculean task tee’d up for today’s IT operations teams. Adding to the confusion is the shared acronym of the two most common practices: While the terms are similar, the approaches and use cases are different.

As an SRE, have you ever had a situation where you were working on an application that was written with non-standard frameworks, or you wanted to get some interesting business data from an application (number of orders processed for example) but you didn’t have access to the source code?

Just a quick blog to let you know our new whitepaper “How to Get Full-Stack Visibility for Your Java Applications” is now available, download it here: How to Get Full-Stack Visibility for Your Java Applications | White Paper (eginnovations.com).

If you are trying to figure out how to measure the performance of your application, you are in the correct place. We spend a lot of time at Stackify thinking about application performance, especially about how to monitor and improve it. In this article, we cover some of our most important application performance metrics you should be tracking.

As our lives increasingly move online and data becomes the lifeblood of business, secure data transmission is imperative. From personal conversations to financial transactions, from healthcare records to sensitive business data, nearly everything we do online requires trust that our data is protected. And if you’ve ever made an HTTPS request, TLS is behind it, providing that trust.

A thin client is a simplified device that relies on a separate server (usually located remotely or in the cloud) to run programs and complete user tasks. It connects to the server through a remote network connection with very little computing happening on an individual user’s device. Because most of the computation occurs and data is stored on the server, thin clients are regarded as a secure efficient option.

Elastic APM supports OpenTelemetry on multiple levels. One easy-to understand scenario, which we previously blogged about, is the direct OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) support in APM Server. This means that you can connect any OpenTelemetry agent to an Elastic APM Server and the APM Server will happily take that data, ingest it into Elasticsearch®, and you can view that OpenTelemetry data in the APM app in Kibana®.

I’m thrilled to announce that ServiceNow has been recognized as a Visionary in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability. We believe this validates our strong vision and unique ability to help customers bring unified telemetry into their existing ServiceNow® Event Management and Service Operations solutions, reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR), and accelerate innovation.

I recently read this thread in the CNCF slack from someone wanting to send metrics and traces directly to Postgres. Reasonable enough right? After all once your data is in postgres you can query it to your heart’s content. And isn’t the general culture of OpenTelemetry that you should be able to do all of Observability without resorting to SaaS tools? The thread, however, is pretty universally opposed to this approach; and I have to say that I agree.

If you have ever worked in a kitchen, you know how tough it is to be short-staffed. Cooks have to work twice as hard and their performance suffers, leaving not-so-happy customers and comped meals for the complainers. It’s similar to how applications operate. Maybe an application is glitching out from poor coding on the backend or bogging from an influx of data coming in. In either case, the end-user application experience suffers.