You've joined a company, or worked there a little while, and you've just now realised that you'll have to do on-call. You feel like you don't know much about how everything fits together, how are you supposed to fix it at 2am when you get paged? So you're a little nervous. Understandable. Here are a few tips to help you become less nervous.

We are happy to announce that the Kafka integration is available for Grafana Cloud, our composable observability platform bringing together metrics, logs, and traces with Grafana. Apache Kafka is an open source distributed event streaming platform that provides high-performance data pipelines, streaming analytics, data integration, and mission-critical applications.

Purchase decisions often begin with a price check. Log management is no different. Evaluate your budget and narrow down the options that fit to choose the tool that gives you the most for what you pay. As always, cheaper is better as long as the platform doesn’t cut any corners. But with log management, there is a catch – not all tools are transparent with their pricing model.

I recently spoke to the IT Director and Head of End User Computing at a leading healthcare company who implemented Salesforce globally across their entire employee user base 9 months ago (before later becoming a Nexthink customer). She told me their Salesforce licensing model was similar to others you’ll see in market: a set of base licenses and then selected add-ons based on employee roles – with some at no charge and others priced ala carte. Her problem? License metering.

What do Google’s DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) and Rollbar have to do with each other? DORA identified four key metrics to measure DevOps performance and identified four levels of DevOps performance from Low to Elite. One way for a team to become an Elite DevOps performer is by focusing on Continuous Code Improvement.

As everything good in life, serverless also comes with its downsides. One of them is the infamous “cold start”. In this article, we’ll cover what they are, what influences serverless startup latency, and how to mitigate its impacts in our applications.

“SLO is a favorite word of SREs,” Grafana Labs Principal Software Engineer Björn “Beorn” Rabenstein said during his talk at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2019. “Of course, it’s also great for design decisions, to set the right goals, and to set alerting in the right way. It’s everything that is good.” So what happens when things go bad?