On Oct. 5, we hosted the first Grafana Virtual Meetup for an EMEA-based audience. Each Grafana meetup features “bite-sized” presentations from our user community and members of the Grafana Labs team. We want to provide opportunities (even virtually!) for members of our community to connect with one another and share what they’re working on or have learned.

Whether you are moving your applications to the cloud or modernizing them using Kubernetes, observing cloud-based workloads is more challenging than observing traditional deployments. When monitoring on-prem monoliths, operations teams had full visibility over the entire stack and full control over how/what telemetry data is collected (from infrastructure to platform to application data).

With over 200 products offered by AWS, when designing a solution, such as a micro-services based system using a number of these services at its core, it becomes rather challenging to not only monitor them but on the onset of a problem troubleshooting it and resolving it within the least amount of time becomes a daunting task. Building a monitorable system requires a deep understanding of the failure domain of the critical components, which is a tall order for a fairly complex system.

As the world is increasingly reliant on technology, software developers, cloud architects, and DevOps practitioners bear a responsibility similar to that of the health industry or to airplane pilots, for example. In this reality, cloud monitoring isn’t optional, it’s a matter of being professional. What is optional, however, is what monitoring solution to go for. Obviously, the one that best fits your specific needs but which one is it?

As CFO of Virtana, I face many of the same challenges as every CFO of a SaaS or enterprise software company today: cost containment, surprises, and an ever-escalating AWS bill. We all need help keeping these things in check. These challenges become even more difficult when your organization goes hybrid cloud. Fortunately, there are tools out there to help our teams help us manage these costs.

What do you like about the place you work? Now there’s a question that many people have very different answers for than they did two years ago. After all, many of the perks of working in an office are no longer being enjoyed by employees. The person who loved walking into their sparkling office building with the stocked kitchen and comfy chairs? They’ve been working from their bedroom for over a year now, left to stock their own kitchen.

Every government in the world is evaluating the steps necessary to radically reduce carbon emissions. The UK Government has been especially proactive, not just assessing these steps, but rolling out aggressive carbon-control strategies and legislation. Originally, the UK Government’s Climate Change Act 2008 set a goal of an 80 percent reduction in the country’s carbon emissions by 2050.

Tucker Callaway is the CEO of LogDNA. He has more than 20 years of experience in enterprise software with an emphasis on developer and DevOps tools. Tucker drives innovation, experimentation, and a culture of collaboration at LogDNA, three ingredients that are essential for the type of growth that we've experienced over the last few years.