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The latest News and Information on Monitoring for Websites, Applications, APIs, Infrastructure, and other technologies.

RapidSpike Status Pages: Clearer, Smarter, More Transparent

Clear communication is everything when it comes to service availability. Whether you’re managing a critical website, a SaaS platform, or customer-facing infrastructure, your users expect clarity, honesty, and real-time insight when things don’t go to plan. That’s why we’re excited to introduce the newly refreshed RapidSpike Status Pages, redesigned to look better, work smarter, and provide deeper, more meaningful insight at a glance.

Why Synthetic Tracing Delivers Better Data, Not Just More Data

In modern observability practices, distributed tracing has become table stakes. Most application performance monitoring (APM) platforms encourage an “instrument everything” approach: Deploy an SDK or agent, hook into every service call and capture every user interaction at scale. On paper, this sounds like complete visibility. In practice, it can turn into a costly firehose of data with diminishing returns.

Beyond the Blue Link: UX Patterns for Google's AI Overviews, AI Mode & Answer Engines

The blue link is dying—but not in the way we expected. When Google’s AI Overviews began appearing at the top of the search results page, the SEO community panicked. Publishers watched click-through rates plummet. The Pew Research Center confirmed their fears: searchers who encounter an AI summary are half as likely to click on traditional search results (8% vs. 15%).

IT Observability in 2026: Lessons From the Past Year

As IT organizations enter 2026, many of the assumptions around monitoring and observability have already been tested. Throughout 2025, infrastructure teams made it clear that visibility alone is not enough. Alerts without context, short data retention, and fragmented tools limited teams’ ability to explain behavior, validate changes, and plan with confidence. This article looks at what emerged from those experiences and how observability expectations continue to shift.

Top tips: RAG isn't the problem, context is. Here are 3 fixes.

Top Tips is a weekly column where we highlight what’s trending in the tech world and list ways to explore these trends. This week, we’ll be talking about how we can improve our retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems using contextual engineering. Prompt engineering has gained a lot of attention in the past year, and it’s finally time to move on to a better experience that transforms the way AI results are provided to us.

Sending Custom Application Metrics to MetricFire's Hosted Graphite

In this article, we’ll show how easy it is to send custom application metrics directly to MetricFire's public carbon endpoint. We’ll build a small Flask application, emit a handful of practical metrics, and generate local traffic to demonstrate how quickly meaningful data can flow from your code to your dashboards.

SSH Check Overview

In this video, learn how to set up and configure SSH checks using Uptime.com. We discuss the frequency options, the importance of Secure Shell (SSH) for secure data communication, and step-by-step instructions for creating a new SSH check in your account. Discover how to set check intervals, configure alert contacts, specify monitoring locations, and ensure your probe servers are whitelisted. Perfect for ensuring your server's remote login capabilities are continuously monitored and secure.