Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

We consistently roll out helpful updates and fun features in Grafana Cloud, our fully managed observability platform powered by the open source Grafana LGTM Stack (Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics). In case you missed them, here’s our monthly round-up (the first of 2025!) of the latest and greatest Grafana Cloud updates. You can also read about all the features we add to Grafana Cloud in our What’s New in Grafana Cloud documentation.

While Kubernetes aims to streamline containerized application management, its multi-layered architecture creates potential points of failure. Problems in any of these layers can manifest as application crashes, resource overutilization, or failed deployments, making cluster maintenance a persistent challenge. Kubernetes meticulously logs all aspects of cluster activity and application output, from individual Pods to ReplicaSets.

We're only one month into 2025, but the momentum keeps building at Bindplane. In January, we rebranded our company as Bindplane, aligning our company name with our core mission: delivering the best OpenTelemetry-native telemetry pipeline on the market. Building on that excitement, we have another announcement: we've expanded and extended our partnership with Google Cloud.

Ever wonder how the Internet actually works? It’s not just magic (though it sometimes feels that way). Behind every webpage you load, every video call you make, and every meme you send, tiny digital messengers called network packets are zipping through cyberspace, carrying data from one point to another. Think of them as the text messages of the Internet; small, efficient, and sometimes frustrating when they don’t arrive on time. But what exactly are network packets? How do they work?

Bugs don’t announce themselves politely. They crash your checkout flow, break authentication, or slow your API to a crawl—usually right before your CEO asks how things are going. And when the error inbox is flooded with a hundred variations of TypeError: cannot read property of undefined, figuring out what actually matters can feel impossible.

NANOG 93 brought the networking community together for insightful discussions on the future of connectivity, emphasizing continuous learning, adaptation, and collaboration. Justin Ryburn highlights key takeaways from this premier event in the world of networking.

One of the main pieces of advice about Service Level Objectives (SLOs) is that they should focus on the user experience. Invariably, this leads to people further down the stack asking, “But how do I make my work fit the users?”—to which the answer is to redefine what we mean by “user.” In the end, a user is anyone who uses whatever it is you’re measuring.

The fundamentals of Icinga 2 are check plugins. They are being executed and their return value is mapped to either Host or Service objects. Everything else follows on top. These check plugins can be either from the Monitoring Plugins or custom. While their origin does not matter, they are the building blocks of an Icinga monitoring stack. If a plugin goes CRITICAL, Icinga 2 alerts the sysadmin.

Alerts and notifications are the backbone of any Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tool, ensuring your team is immediately aware of critical issues. At AppSignal, we’re always improving our toolkit to help you stay ahead of problems before they impact performance or reliability. We've made huge improvements to how you can manage your app notifications and alerts with AppSignal.

Apache ActiveMQ is a widely used message broker that enables seamless communication between distributed applications. However, as the volume of messages increases, performance bottlenecks can arise, leading to slow message processing, high latency, broker crashes, and out of memory (OOM) errors. One of the most critical issues affecting ActiveMQ is OOM errors, which occur when the broker exceeds its allocated heap memory. This can result in service failures, message loss, and prolonged downtime.