Metrics are the lifeblood of every data-driven decision. Question after question on forums like Reddit, Stack Overflow and other IT communities ask which metrics teams should focus on for improving website speed and end-user experience. There’s a push in web development circles to focus on Time to First Byte (TTFB) to measure and improve website speed. But every viewpoint has its opposition.

Akamai is a leading provider of content delivery network solutions around the world, handling many millions of HTTP requests per second. By Akamai’s estimates, its CDN platform delivers 15 to 30 percent of global web traffic. If you’re using Akamai to accelerate and protect the delivery of content to your users, we are pleased to announce that you can now use Datadog to monitor the utilization and performance of your CDN.

As a longtime systems engineer, Blerim Sheqa knows all about using tools like Grafana to debug issues in infrastructures. Currently the CPO of Icinga, an open source monitoring software, he gave a talk at GrafanaCon LA about how not to fail at visualization.

Whilst Citrix Synergy 2019 was in full-flow in Atlanta, GA, Goliath Technologies were also keeping busy with the 11.7.8 release of Goliath Performance Monitor, which adds several features that were in demand by many customers. I’ve had the chance to review this latest release, and wanted to touch on some of the features that are new to version 11.7.8, as well as cover ground on some of the features and capabilities already existing in the product today.

Coming back from Monitorama, I had a chance to sit back and start playing with some tools to see how they worked. Prometheus is a pretty ubiquitous tool in the monitoring space, it's pretty easy to spin up, and is open-source. Having a very active community of engaged developers means finding help articles or guides is easy. We are also going to use Grafana to build nicer looking graphs based on API queries from Prometheus.