Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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

Ask Miss O11y: Logs vs. Traces

Ah, good question! TL;DR: Trace instead of log. Traces show connection, performance, concurrency, and causality. Logs are the original observability, right? Back in the day, I did all my debugging with `printf.` Sometimes I still write `console.log(“JESS WAS HERE”)` to see that my code ran. That’s instrumentation, technically. What if I emitted a “JESS WAS HERE” span instead? What’s so great about a span in a trace? Yeah, and so do logs in any decent framework.

Businesses Must Know About the Best Practices in Asset Monitoring

Lots of organizations do not pay attention to their assets and pieces of equipment, who is using them and where are they located. These are particularly important questions but usually, they are ignored as a result assets are lost and nowhere to be found when they are required. Lots of employees waste their time finding the required assets and pieces of equipment. It also leads to delayed production work. Overall, the top line and bottom line suffer.

Network Alerts-Monitoring and Notifications

When it comes to IT, you can’t do anything with an asset you can’t see. When it comes to your networking, monitoring offers the eyeballs to know what is going on. But IT and network pros don’t spend all day staring at a dashboard waiting for something to happen. Like your local police department, they rely on notifications of trouble. Instead of 911 calls, IT depends on network alerts.

Kubernetes: Tips, Tricks, Pitfalls, and More

If you’re involved in IT, you’ve likely come across the word “Kubernetes.” It’s a Greek word that means “boat.” It’s one of the most exciting developments in cloud-native hosting in years. Kubernetes has unlocked a new universe of reliability, scalability, and observability, changing how organizations behave and redefining what’s possible. But what exactly is it?

Monitoring Hyper-V and ESXi-what should you do?

Over the years, I found that building out monitoring scripts and using them properly has proven to be a challenge. When I look back at my internal IT days using platforms like Whatsupgold, PRTG, or N-central, the question always remained the same: how can I monitor efficiently and get alerts that matter? In this blog post, I thought I’d tackle something that is a challenge for a lot of people: monitoring Hypervisors.

Monitoring critical systems at Roblox with Grafana and Grafana Agent

It’s like an obby unto itself: With roughly 100 million global active users, how does an observability team monitor operations and troubleshoot problems that pop up across more than 10,000 servers? In this session, you’ll get an inside look at how the Roblox team evolved their observability platform to combine a multitude of data sources, from low-level hardware health to high-level performance metrics. Grafana Agent plays a key role by replacing many special-purpose pipelines with a single, easy-to-manage tool. Roblox’s observability team has met growing demand to provide actionable insights to hundreds of engineers, covering dozens of data sources and thousands of Grafana dashboards, which all help keep its infrastructure running and ready for play.

Understanding data analysis and online activity with David Belson

Network AF host and Kentik CEO Avi Freedman discusses data analysis and trends in understanding online activity with David Belson. David is Cloudflare's Head of Data Insight, where he helps the organization communicate information about the internet such as outages and changes in protocol adoption.

What Does Observability Mean For You?

The late 1990s were a crazy time in the technology industry. Apple converted a blueberry into a computer, Google still had a “new search engine” smell, and while Y2K loomed over our heads Napster was showing everyone how bad Metallica’s music sounded. Meanwhile, in a garage in Tulsa, Oklahoma, brothers Donald and David Yonce launched a network monitoring software company and named it SolarWinds.