Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Today marks a significant milestone for SolarWinds, as we’ve formally announced our organizational direction to evolve from our leadership position in monitoring to become a leader in observability. Today is also significant because it marks the official release of our Hybrid Cloud Observability, and I’m excited to share more details on what we believe expands the scope of observability for the market.

At SolarWinds, our purpose is to enrich the lives of the people we serve. In a world where complexity is expanding, our commitment to offer simple yet powerful IT solutions has served us well throughout our more than 20-year history. Today’s pace of digital transformation means businesses are actively building new applications and leveraging multi-cloud deployments, while reworking their existing ones, to achieve operational excellence.

OpenTelemetry has been getting a lot of attention in the observability field. Moreover, in StackState’s latest release, we added support for OpenTelemetry traces. Melcom van Eeden, software developer at StackState, was one of our developer champions who made this possible. In addition to joining us on this episode of StackPod, he wrote a blog post on how to leverage OpenTelemetry with StackState and he recorded a tutorial video about the topic.

We hear a lot of questions from folks taking their first steps into website monitoring about how the service works and what we offer. One of the more frequently asked questions is why they need us at all. After all, they have metrics from XYZ provider who can tell them if they have consumed too much bandwidth or are overloaded with traffic. Wouldn’t they just know that they were up or down by watching those metrics?

DevOps: Development and Operations joined together in perfect harmony, one feeding the other and vice-versa. That's the dream. But it's easy for the link between the two to be broken. 'Dev' stops talking to 'Ops,' or Ops falls out with Dev, often because of a lack of understanding of each other's goals. That's where Monitoring and Observability come in. They're like the mediators whose job is to make sure the two main players in DevOps keep that metaphorical dialogue open.

With the Kafka Summit fast approaching, I thought it was time to get my hands dirty and see what it’s all about. As an advocate for IoT, I heard about Kafka but was too embedded in protocols like MQTT to investigate further. For the uninitiated (like me) both protocols seem extremely similar if not almost competing. However, I have learned this is far from the case and actually, in many cases, they complement one another.

It’s no secret that the world of manufacturing is changing fast. The “fourth industrial revolution”, a.k.a. Industry 4.0, is leading to the digitization of just about every stage in the manufacturing process. Of course, a shift from a primarily analog and mechanical world to one where digital is at the forefront means increased bandwidth requirements, larger potential attack surfaces for cybersecurity exploits, and a drastic increase in the sheer amount of network-connected devices.

IoT devices and technologies are very popular now. Therefore, an important task is to ensure the smooth operation of IoT infrastructures. In this article, we will learn why and how to monitor MQTT metrics and also look at the tools that you should use for monitoring.

The history of this blog explaining what is what in the world of technology is long, we admit. Maybe one day we’ll release a compilation episode, sort of a cabaret musical thing, with all the info and even some special guests, why not! Meanwhile we also tell you what Active Directory is.