The border between the management of telecommunications networks and the services that they support and the management of IT infrastructures and the applications that they support has always been a porous one. One might say that they are like two dialects of the same language rather than different languages. Nonetheless, these areas, whether characterised by technology or practice, are different and have, for the most part, been served by different vendors and products.

Picture this: It’s 2 p.m. and you’re sipping on coffee, happily chugging away at your daily routine work. The security team shoots you a message saying the latest pentest or security scan found an issue that needs quick remediation. On the surface, that’s not a problem and can be considered somewhat routine, given the pace of new CVEs coming out. But what if you look at your tooling and find it lacking when you start remediating the issue?

For retailers and ecommerce store owners, your bottom line is always affected whenever your service is down, due to today's consumers expecting their digital interactions to operate around the clock. This is particularly crucial during spikes in traffic due to sales, like Black Friday or Cyber Monday.

No one wants to get an alert in the middle of the night. No one wants their Slack flooded to the point of opting out from channels. And indeed, no one wants an urgent alert to be ignored, spiraling into an outage. Getting the right alert to the right person through the right channel — with the goal of initiating immediate action — is the last mile of observability.

In the ever-evolving landscape of software development and IT operations, monitoring tools play a pivotal role in ensuring the performance, reliability, and availability of your applications. Two key disciplines in this domain are observability and Application Performance Management (APM). This post will help you understand the nuances between observability and APM, exploring their unique characteristics, similarities, benefits and differences.

This is the third and final blog post in a series about shifting Observability left. If you have not yet read the first two, you can find the first post here and the second post here. Observability is fundamental to modern software development, enabling developers to gain deep insights into their application’s behavior and performance.

The OpenTelemetry Collector is a core part of telemetry pipelines, which makes it one of the parts of your infrastructure that must be as secure as possible. The general advice from the OpenTelemetry teams is to build a custom Collector executable instead of using the supplied ones when you’re using it in a production scenario. However, that isn’t an easy task, and that prompted me to build something.

Observability, in modern software engineering, has evolved into a paramount concept, shedding light on the intricate inner workings of complex systems. Three essential pillars support this quest for clarity: logging, traces, and metrics. These interconnected elements collectively form the backbone of observability, enabling us to understand our software as never before. Think of a system as a bustling city.

Digital transformation is at the core of media and entertainment organizations, it’s vital for these firms to constantly evolve to provide the best user experience to their customers. These companies must seek new and interesting content, services, and tailored offerings that enhance the audience’s experience and supply personalization. However, whilst these investments are essential to remain competitive, they’re also particularly costly.

When the process of an application malfunctions, it can have a negative impact on users and the business. Companies need a way to identify and resolve the root cause of problems smartly. This is where monitoring and observability come in. Monitoring and observability are two methods for identifying the underlying cause of problems. Observability in IT is a concept that goes further than simple monitoring.