Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Cron job monitoring is the part of observability most teams skip until a backup turns out to have stopped running three weeks ago. A web server that falls over generates errors, trips a threshold and pages someone inside a minute. A nightly job that quietly stops running generates nothing at all. There is no error rate to alert on, no latency spike, no failed health check. There is only an absence, and absence is invisible to almost every monitoring setup by default.

Most teams building an on-call rotation template in Google Calendar get the first two steps right and the third one wrong. Creating a shared calendar is easy. Inviting the team is easy. Expressing "four people, one week each, forever, handing off Monday morning" as a set of recurring events is where it falls apart, usually into a mess of one off entries that someone has to rebuild by hand every quarter.

Certificate expiry is the most predictable outage in all of infrastructure. The date is printed inside the certificate. You can read it ninety days ahead. Nothing about it is a surprise, and yet SSL certificate expiry alerts remain one of the most common gaps in otherwise mature monitoring setups, and expired certificates keep taking down production systems at companies with serious engineering teams.

Users report that an internal application has gone slow, the server dashboards look normal, and the network group says nothing changed on their side. So where between the user and the application does the time actually go? Much of that answer comes from traceroute. The command lists every router a packet crosses on the way to its destination, with a timing figure set against each one. Arguments about ownership then come down to a single device on a single route.

CloudZero’s own AI Economics Pulse for September found the 75th percentile of its 430-company customer panel crossed 10% of its cloud bill on AI for the first time in August. Gartner’s latest survey found only 22% of organizations have scaled AI successfully and 11% don’t know what their own function spent on it last year. CJ Gustafson showed what that gap looks like on an actual invoice this week.

Worldwide AI spending will reach $2.59 trillion in 2026, up 47% from 2025, according to Gartner. Yet only 37% of organizations report any earnings impact from AI, McKinsey finds. These AI statistics cover what companies spend, what AI costs to run, and the ROI they're actually getting. That gap between the two headline numbers is the story of AI in 2026.

Pipeline Intelligence already recommends processors, reads live telemetry, detects log types, and generates processor bundles from natural language. But most of it lives inside a single processor node. You still have to know which one to open and what to ask for. This changes today. Bindplane Agent is your AI assistant inside Bindplane, ready to act on what you describe in plain language.

ScienceLogic has been named a 2026 TrustRadius Tech Cares Award winner, marking our third time receiving the recognition. The Tech Cares Awards recognize B2B technology companies demonstrating meaningful corporate social responsibility through their support of employees, communities, and the environment.

A help desk is the front-line function that receives user issues and requests, records them, provides basic troubleshooting, and routes unresolved work to the appropriate specialist. Its goal is to restore user productivity quickly. Typical help desk activities include: The work is usually tactical and reactive. A user cannot connect, open an application, or complete a task, so the help desk responds.

The best DNS monitoring tools are Hyperping for fast DNS checks with on-call and a status page, Oh Dear for authoritative nameserver comparison and change history, Site24x7 for DNSSEC and global locations inside a suite, UptimeRobot for inexpensive DNS checks next to HTTP, and DNS Spy for dedicated DNS security and WHOIS. I analyzed 24 current products and shortlisted five. Every tool below can query DNS on a schedule and alert when the answer is missing or wrong.