Datadog’s rapid growth illustrates a couple of key industry themes: First, growth in cloud applications continues at an unprecedented rate, and second, cloud applications require enterprises to rethink existing tools for visibility. Most significantly, the fact that Datadog has grown rapidly even as traditional monitoring companies have floundered, is a clear illustration of how companies built for a cloud era will disrupt those that were built for an on-premises era.

It all starts with Cortex – a horizontally scalable clustered version of Prometheus that was created three years ago and is now a CNCF Sandbox project. Cortex uses the PromQL engine and the same chunk format as Prometheus – literally the same code base.

Thanks to advancements in JavaScript engines, the performance of websites has considerably improved in recent years. However, there are aspects of websites that are out of the control of engines and yet to be adequately optimized by browsers. One of these aspects is the number of HTTP requests that your webpage makes.

There’s a huge need among our Metrictank and Grafana Cloud customers to be able to import their existing data from Graphite, so we recently refactored the importer tools to make the process easier. A few years ago, I wrote a utility to import Whisper data into Cassandra. At that time, Cassandra was the only store that Metrictank supported. But since then, we’ve added Bigtable, and we’ll likely add more stores.

We are delighted to welcome guest blogger Brian Wren of Microsoft. Brian is something of a superstar in the SCOM world – and you will see why when you check out his technical guides on TechNet or Microsoft Learn. His series on Management Pack Authoring for SCOM is a definitive guide that has helped many of us get started with a difficult topic. It is fair to say that when Brian works his magic, he makes the complicated perfectly understandable.