With the fall season well underway here in the northern hemisphere, the StatusGator team has been donning our hoodies and getting down to business on some long-requested features. We’ve got some fresh updates and features that we think you’ll really like — giving you even more control and insight over your monitors.

We’ve got a great new feature for your website monitors: timeout configuration! Now, you can fine-tune your monitors by setting a custom timeout – the maximum amount of time (in seconds) you’re willing to wait for a response before considering the service down. You can choose from predefined options of 5, 15, 30, or 60 seconds, allowing for flexibility based on your needs. This feature gives you more control over how sensitive your website monitors are to slow networks.

We’ve added a new option to help you customize your status page even further – you can now upload a separate logo specifically for dark mode! This ensures your logo looks great, no matter which theme your users are viewing. To set this up, simply go to the Status Page Settings and head to the Appearance section. There, you’ll find the option to upload a logo tailored for dark mode.

Starting your journey to build your first OTel Collector can be really exciting, but it can also feel a bit overwhelming. OpenTelemetry, or OTel, is an amazing tool that can help standardize the collection of observability data, but it's normal to feel a bit lost at first. There are lots of little details and best practices that can make the whole process easier, but many of us end up learning them the hard way.

Camunda 8 is a process orchestration platform that automates and executes business processes at scale. Many organizations orchestrate their business processes using Camunda 8 Self-Managed because it can operate in their preferred public cloud provider, such as AWS, or in a private cloud, like a Kubernetes cluster. However, hosting Camunda 8 while maintaining its health and performance will require complete visibility into your environment, helping you properly allocate resources and minimize downtime.

Kentik Data Explorer is a powerful tool designed for engineers managing complex environments. It provides comprehensive visibility across various cloud platforms by ingesting and enriching telemetry data from sources like AWS, GCP, and Azure, and with the ability to explore data through granular filters and dimensions, engineers can quickly analyze cloud performance, detect security threats, and control costs in real-time exploration and historically.

Refinery is Honeycomb’s sampling proxy, which our largest customers use to improve the value they get from their telemetry. It has a variety of interesting samplers to choose from. One category of these is called dynamic sampling. It’s basically a technique for adjusting sample rates to account for the volume of incoming data—but doing so in a way that rare events get more priority than common events. Honeycomb’s query engine can compensate for sampling rates on a per-event basis.

Collection agents emerged to alleviate the pain of having log files distributed around your application servers. However, they brought new problems since each log analysis tool wanted its own agent, trading in its own protocols and/or formats, usually targeting only a single use case. Meaning you had to install multiple agents for different use cases. Onboarding data and managing all these agents seems to be an afterthought.

In Software development, code readability transforms complexity into clarity. Martin Fowler said: Code should be readable and manageable so other developers can understand and work without additional fatigue. .NET has many ways to enhance readability and manageability. This post will explore C#'s extension methods by listing five use cases that I use on all of the ASP.NET Core projects I'm working on.