At SquaredUp, we are all about dashboards and visualizations that enable you to build the ideal single pane of glass. If you work in monitoring, you know that designing the perfect dashboards that give you all of your important metrics at a glance, is easier said than done. Most of the time, it takes several attempts to optimize a dashboard for easy reading, and more often than not, this step is neglected. I wouldn’t recommend skipping over this step though.

At AWS re:Invent today, Dr. Werner Vogels, VP and CTO of Amazon.com, announced a partnership between AWS and Grafana Labs, resulting in the Amazon Managed Service for Grafana, a scalable managed offering that provides AWS customers a native way to run Grafana directly within AWS alongside all their other AWS services. We’d like to give a big thanks to the whole Grafana community. Not only have they inspired us with so many great use cases, but they help us build better software every day.

Microsoft Azure and Microsoft, in general, has a history of being seen as designed for big enterprises only. Those days are in the past. Azure is working its way to the front of the pack for cloud services. It is easy to transition your workflows to Azure because it connects well with other Microsoft tools you use. Even though it is a smoother transition, it is just as complex and complicated as other large cloud providers.

Cloud native observability is at a watershed moment. The explosion of microservices has created previously unseen amounts of monitoring data, limiting the ability of humans and computer systems to extract meaning from data with last-generation tools. Debugging is often a process of detecting correlation, and then turning correlations into causal connections. This is where modern cloud native tooling comes in.

First of all: apologies...because although the title suggests otherwise, this blog is not about "Observability VS. Monitoring." It's a great misconception that observability is this hot new technology that's here to replace your monitoring tools.

Today, AWS announced enhancements for AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry. We’re working with AWS to build in additional support from partners. In tandem with that launch, Honeycomb is announcing support for event ingestion using OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP). With that change, you can simplify management overhead and configuration by no longer needing to maintain a separate OpenTelemetry exporter.

It’s safe to say that 2020 has been quite the year for everyone, and at Dashbird we’ve had quite a few changes of our own. It became the year full of improvements, growth, and feature releases that we had only imagined a year ago. This is our round-up of all the feature releases we launched this year. Just starting out with Dashbird? Great, you are in the right place.