Infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tools like Terraform and CloudFormation allow teams to define, manage, and provision their cloud infrastructure using code, as opposed to clicking through consoles or executing commands via a CLI. IaC adoption is now widespread and helps teams increase productivity and efficiency, but it also introduces new surface area for mistakes, defects, and other risks.

The holidays are almost here, and it’s the perfect time to catch up on everything we’ve rolled out in November. We’ve been busy launching features to make your life easier — so let’s take a quick recap and get you ready for the season!

The error "upstream connect error or disconnect/reset before headers. reset reason: connection failure" has become a challenge for DevOps teams. This critical error, occurring when services fail to establish or maintain connections with their upstream dependencies, can significantly impact system reliability and user experience.

We are excited to announce an enhancement to one of our most unique features at Oh Dear: Broken Links! Broken links monitoring crawls your entire website for internal and external links but we now take this a step further by expanding our monitoring to include CSS, JavaScript, and image links.

We all implement tools to monitor our nodes and keep our entire cluster up and running. But how often do updates, failures, or errors mean that users suffer outages, even though our status boards look green? As Kubernetes has enabled more complex microservice architecture, the gap between the state of the dashboard, and the health of services for the user, has grown wider.

Connecting to data sources in a private network or an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) can require extra attention to the network security configuration to prevent unintended network exposure. For example, if you wanted to query a network-secured data source, like a MySQL database or an Elasticsearch cluster, that is hosted in an on-premises private network, you would need to open your network to inbound queries from a range of IP addresses.

With 2024 coming to a close, it’s a good time to reflect on how Grafana Cloud has evolved this year — and synthetic monitoring, in particular, is one area where we’ve really focused our efforts. In May, we rolled out a revamped version of Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring with the overall goal of making your monitoring processes not just more efficient, but more impactful.

In June 2019, a curious thing happened. Students were forced to go fully analog, putting pencil to paper when they couldn’t log in to their Google Classroom accounts. Avid media consumers sat staring blankly at buffering YouTube videos. Gmail notifications came to a screeching halt as inboxes sat eerily quiet. It wasn’t that the Google Cloud Platform had crashed — far from it.

Monitoring the health of your API endpoints is crucial to keeping your applications running smoothly and ensuring users have a reliable experience. Keeping an eye on 4XX and 5XX status codes can help you spot issues like client errors, misconfigurations, or server problems before they get out of hand. Plus, setting up alerts for when these errors spike allows you to react quickly, fix problems, and maintain a high-quality service that your users can count on.

SNMP, which stands for Simple Network Management Protocol, is often viewed as a legacy protocol, with SNMP not being actively worked on anymore, which led to both Microsoft and Google pronouncing that SNMP was dead. Yet, SNMP is still commonly used by numerous industries as the advantages of SNMP, especially for network monitoring, are profound. Practically, all network components across all vendors possess built-in SNMP capability.