Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As someone who's been in the tech space for years, I've seen the evolution of user expectations and the way businesses have adapted to the digital world. What strikes me most today is how fast things have to move. I remember a time when uptime alone was the key to a successful service. Today, it’s no longer enough for a service to just be “up”—it needs to be fast, seamless, and reliable at all times.

In January 2025, security researchers uncovered a critical DNS misconfiguration involving Mastercard. For nearly five years, one of Mastercard’s DNS records pointed to the incorrect domain "akam.ne" instead of the intended "akam.net." This error, caused by a simple typographical mistake, created a vulnerability that could have allowed malicious actors to intercept or redirect traffic.

Cofounder Doreen Jacobi spoke with several of our customers about the revolution AI is bringing to incident management. Artificial Intelligence has seamlessly integrated into our daily lives, often in ways we barely notice. But what does that actually mean for industries facing complex challenges, like incident management? What real benefits does AI bring today, and how might it shape the future?

There are a limited number of investments that a team can make in any given year and it can be daunting to choose the “right” ones. In R&D, there is always more to do. There is always more to research, design, build, fix, maintain, and improve. Spread across multiple domains, the possibilities multiply: we’re spoiled for choice—and, while inspiring, the breadth of possible investment areas can be overwhelming.

2022 was the "Model T" moment for generative AI, with ChatGPT making its grand entrance and shaking up digital transformation the way Ford changed mobility. The excitement and trust in AI are so real that VCs have funneled $3.9 billion into generative AI in Q3 2024 alone. 49% of companies are allocating new budgets to AI initiatives, and firms like Marsh McLennan have already deployed 40+ AI applications in production.

In July 2024, a routine network configuration change at Microsoft caused a global outage that left millions without access for 90 minutes. The culprit, however, was a network issue within the Microsoft WAN that disrupted global routes. Unfortunately, this isn’t a one-off network outage but a part of a broader, troubling trend. Modern Network Operation Centers (NOCs) are far too siloed and broken to handle the growing complexity of modern networks.

According to a study by IBM, organizations, on average, take more than 190 days to identify a data breach and an additional 60 or more days to remediate the issue. The financial implications of such an event, including mitigation and remediation, run into millions and can pose a serious risk to business continuity. However, organizations can effectively handle these scenarios with the help of robust security solutions and well-defined processes.

Defending against the current and evolving threat landscape requires a multi-layered defense strategy. A robust, understandable and easy-to-use Network Detection and Response (NDR) solution is a core component of such a defense strategy.

Two weeks into the alpha release of InfluxDB 3 Core (our new open source offering) and InfluxDB 3 Enterprise (our newest commercial offering), we’ve received a good amount of feedback that the 72 hour limitation in Core is too limiting. This fell into three categories: For the users in category 1, we’re announcing a free tier of InfluxDB 3 Enterprise for at-home, non-commercial use.

When storing large amounts of data, the cost ($) to store each gigabyte (GB) is the typical measure used to gauge the efficiency of the storage system. The biggest driver of storage cost is the protection method used. It is common to protect data by either having multiple replicas within the storage system or by using erasure coding to create data chunks and parity chunks to reduce the raw storage consumed, albeit at the cost of higher CPU utilisation.