When I had my first child almost six years ago, I expected that most of my time would be spent in the role of a teacher rather than a student. I have two kids now — and I’m certainly teaching them as much as I can as they grow and learn to navigate the world — but if someone were keeping score, my kids might end up on top when it comes to who’s taught who more. Another thing that surprised me is how similar building a family is to build a company from the ground up.

Everyone in the software industry is in a race to become more agile. We all want to improve the performance of our software development lifecycle (SLDC). But how do you actually do that? If you want to improve your performance, first determine what KPI you’d like to improve. DORA metrics offer a good set of KPIs to track and improve. It started as a research by the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) and Google Cloud (which later acquired DORA), to understand what makes high performing teams.

How do you pass context from events that concern Security teams to Development teams who can make changes and address those events? Often this involves a series of meetings and discussion that can take days or weeks to filter down from security event to developer awareness. Compounding the problem, developers generally do not have access to Splunk Core, Cloud or Enterprise indexes used by security teams, and indeed, may use only Splunk Observability for their metrics, traces and even logs.

If you were pulled into a meeting right now and asked to give your thoughts on how to achieve better outcomes with monitoring and observability, what would you recommend? Would you default to suggesting that your team improve Mean Time To Detect (MTTD)? Sure, you might make some improvements in that area, but it turns out that most of the opportunities lie in what comes after your system detects an issue. Let’s examine how to measure improvements in monitoring and observability.

For smart cities of the future, monitoring infrastructure metrics like fuel and water levels is vital to optimizing operations. Fuelics PC designs and deploys battery-operated narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) sensors that monitor fuel, water, waste, and even parking capacity at the edge, then transmit that data to the cloud for easy viewing and monitoring.

The best part of my job is talking with prospects and customers about their logging and data practices. I love to talk about everything they are currently doing and hope to accomplish so I can get a sense of overall goals and understand current pain points. It’s vital to come up with solutions that provide broad value across the enterprise and not just a narrow tactical win with limited impact.

When new web browser versions are released, new bugs are inevitably introduced, which can degrade a website’s performance and increase the overall page load time. This can severely impact a user’s engagement and a business’s bottom line.

Organizations in every industry are becoming increasingly dependent upon data to drive more efficient business processes and a better user experience. As the data collection and preparation processes that support these initiatives grow more complex, the likelihood of failures, performance bottlenecks, and quality issues within data workflows also increases.

Datadog has made a name for itself as a popular cloud-native application performance monitoring tool, measuring a system’s health and status based on the telemetry data it generates. This telemetry includes machine-generated data, such as logs, metrics and traces. Cloud based applications and infrastructure generate millions (even billions) of logs – and analyzing them can generate a wealth of insights for DevOps, security, product teams and more.

ICYMI, this year’s Monitorama marks a return to the in-person event following a pandemic hiatus. In Part 1 of this series, I shared what it was like to navigate a tech conference in the post-pandemic world and the most engaging themes of the conference including tracing, SLIs, OpenTelemetry, and more. Now for Part 2, let’s dive into the talks. As usual the Monitorama talk selection team did a bang-up job. Every talk was interesting, but a few jumped out at me for some very specific reasons.