We’ve reached the point where our ability to collect data has actually exceeded our ability to process it. Nowadays, it’s commonplace for organizations to have terabytes or even petabytes worth of data sitting in storage, waiting patiently for well-intentioned systems admins to eventually analyze it.

DevOps is an IT delivery concept that combines people, practices and tools with the shared goal of accelerating the development of applications and services. Adopting DevOps at enterprise level typically requires: The continuous development of DevOps practices, as well as other factors like the rapid pace of modern code changes, facilitates a need for DevOps monitoring: a set of tools and processes to support the entire software development lifecycle.

The real beauty of this modern, cloud-fueled, DevOps-driven world that we are living in is that it’s so highly composable. In so many ways, we’ve been freed from the limitations and structures of the previous annals of software and technology history to build things the way that we want to, and however we choose to do so.

Grafana Loki is Grafana Labs’ open source log aggregation system inspired by Prometheus. Loki is horizontally scalable, highly available, and multi-tenant. In addition, Grafana Cloud Logs is our fully managed, lightweight, and cost-effective log aggregation system based on Grafana Loki, with free and paid options for individuals, teams, and large enterprises.

Redis is an open-sourced, BSD 3 licensed, highly efficient in-memory data store. It is used widely in the industry because of its incredible performance and ease of use. It can easily be used as a distributed, in-memory key-value store, cache, or message broker. It can hold virtually any data structure, making it highly versatile. Redis was architectured and developed with speed in mind and designed to keep all the data in memory.

For any organization that stores, processes, or transmits cardholder data, monitoring can pose a particular set of challenges. The Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS) dictates rigorous monitoring and data security requirements for the cardholder data environments (CDEs) of all merchants, service providers, and financial institutions.

Open source monitoring and observability tools can be found in production all over the world – whether they’re being used by startups or entire enterprise development teams. DevOps, ITOps, and other technical teams rely on tools like Prometheus, Grafana, OpenSearch, OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, Nagios, Zabbix, Graphite, InfluxDB, and others to monitor and troubleshoot their cloud environment.

Software monitoring, how does it work? “We paid for a bunch of tools but we don’t know what we should be looking at. There are tons of charts that don’t seem to mean anything!” If you talk to people about software monitoring you’ve inevitably heard something similar to this. With so many possible metrics it can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. Even with curated dashboards there is inherent confusion about what is important.