This post was originally published on the Tracetest blog. Want to run trace-based tests with Elastic APM? Today is your lucky day. We're happy to announce that Tracetest now integrates with Elastic Observability APM. Check out this hands-on example of how Tracetest works with Elastic Observability APM and OpenTelemetry! Tracetest is a CNCF project aiming to provide a solution for deep integration and system testing by leveraging the rich data in distributed system traces.

In modern observability, Lucene is the most commonly used language for log analysis. Lucene has earned its place as a query language. Still, as the industry demands change and the challenge of observability grows more difficult, Lucene’s limitations become more obvious.

Loki and Prometheus are both open source tools. While Loki is a log aggregation tool, Prometheus is a metrics monitoring tool. Loki’s design is inspired by Prometheus but for logs. This blog post compares the two common monitoring tools Loki vs Prometheus, to help you understand their key differences. Log management and metrics monitoring are critical aspects of monitoring a software system effectively.

DevOps engineers wishing to troubleshoot Kubernetes applications can turn to log messages to pinpoint the cause of errors and their impact on the rest of the cluster. When troubleshooting a running application, engineers need real-time access to logs generated across multiple components. Collecting live streaming log data lets engineers: The challenge that engineers face is accessing comprehensive, live streams of Kubernetes log data.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) - or more specifically Machine Learning (ML) - and automation were big topics for many of our customers in 2022. Common reasons for the interest in AI and automation were to: increase efficiency, reduce manual processing, minimise human error and - especially for the use of ML - identify ‘unknown unknowns’.

Several tech giants like Amazon and Netflix have jumped from their monolithic applications to microservices. This has allowed them to expand their business interface tremendously and improve their services. Not only them, but most businesses today are dependent on microservices. Twitter currently has about a thousand such services working together, releasing meaningful outputs.

Over the past decade, Prometheus has become the most prominent open source monitoring tool in the world, allowing users to quickly and easily collect metrics on their systems and help identify issues in their cloud infrastructure and applications. Prometheus was originally developed by SoundCloud when the company felt their metrics and monitoring solutions weren’t meeting their needs.