Building SaaS products is hard. Making customers happy is even harder. I should know, I’ve built a start-up that failed! But, not everything is that bad. I learned a lot. Now I maintain a few open-source Node.js projects at Sematext. It’s an observability SaaS. I joined to help make the log management features as good as they can be. If you’ve never heard that term before, my co-worker wrote a great introductory explanation of what Log Management is right here.

DigitalOcean droplets provide low-cost scale from a popular server provider. With DigitalOcean Monitoring, you can collect metrics for visibility, monitor Droplet performance, and receive alerts when problems arise in your infrastructure. But when you need to deep dive into your application to debug an issue, resolve an incident, or identify opportunities to improve your platform, you need a deep understanding of the underlying operating system and how it interacts within its environment.

Distributed tracing allows you to track the execution of your user's transactions by following them between applications’ microservices. It provides easy to understand visualizations of transactional lifespan with the ability to pinpoint any slowdowns and errors in response to microservices. During my presentation at Illuminate, I shared that we extended the Sumo Logic platform to cover application performance use cases.

When providing services to your customers you need to keep an eye on everything that could impact your success with that – from low-level performance metrics to high-level business key performance indicators. From server-side logs to stack traces giving you full visibility into business and software processes that underpin your product. That’s where cloud monitoring tools and services come into play.

This article is part 2 of a four-part series of articles about Elasticsearch performance monitoring. Part 1 explains what Elasticsearch is and how it works, while in this part, we’re going to look at Elasticsearch’s capabilities and potential use cases, and how to check its status. We’ll identify key metrics that you need to monitor to maintain the health and performance of your Elasticsearch cluster.

Breaking down larger, monolithic software, services, and applications into microservices has become a standard practice for developers. While this solves many issues, it also creates new ones. Architectures composed of microservices create their own unique challenges. In this article, we are going to break down some of the most common. More specifically, we are going to assess how observability-based solutions can overcome many of these obstacles.

More and more employers are looking for people experienced in building and running Kubernetes-based systems, so it’s a great time to start learning how to take advantage of the new technology. Elasticsearch consists of multiple nodes working together, and Kubernetes can automate the process of creating these nodes and taking care of the infrastructure for us, so running ELK on Kubernetes can be a good options in many scenarios.

Kubernetes monitoring can be complex. To do it successfully requires several components to be monitored simultaneously. First, it’s important to understand what those components are, which metrics should be monitored and what tools are available to do so. In this post, we’ll take a close look at everything you need to know to get started with monitoring your Kubernetes-based system.

In July, we rolled out SolarWinds® Papertrail™ support for SAML v2.0. SAML authentication allows you to log into your Active Directory® domain or intranet and have immediate access to Papertrail, with no additional login required. Today we’re extending Papertrail SAML 2.0 support to include group mapping. Group mapping allows you to define organization and product roles, and grant access to logs and billings plans, by adding an account to an identify provider group.

What are logs? In computing, when generally speaking of “log”, we refer to information belonging to a more or less low level reported by the operating system or a specific application that helps identify what is being done, including errors, problems or minor warnings, and when that happens, it indicates the date and time. In some cases, the source, the user, the IP address and other interesting fields from the point of view of what has happened can be identified.