With more than 300,000 customers, a thriving community of 185,000 THWACK® users, frequent SWUG™ events, and some 650,000 developers certified on SolarWinds® products, we have a unique ability to keep our fingers on the pulse of what our clients need to better manage, monitor, and understand their complex environments. We’re reminded every day how these customer interactions collectively serve as a crucial competitive advantage.

I care a lot about instrumentation and telemetry and OpenTelemetry, so I was thinking of joining the observability engineering team at my company… but it seems like they spend all their time managing Prometheus and Grafana. I guess I was expecting something very different?

Organizations in every industry are becoming increasingly dependent upon data to drive more efficient business processes and a better user experience. As the data collection and preparation processes that support these initiatives grow more complex, the likelihood of failures, performance bottlenecks, and quality issues within data workflows also increases.

The world of IT has gone through a significant amount of change in the last five to 10 years, and the rate of digital transformation can be challenging for organizations of all sizes. Keeping up with new and evolving capabilities alongside an increasingly distributed talent pool can be tough. That’s why it has always been my goal to keep up with the latest trends and provide the best tools for professionals working in the IT trenches. One of those emerging trends is observability.

Google’s Core Web Vitals (CWVs) are used to rank the performance of mobile sites or pages. It’s easy to see when your CWV scores are low, but it’s not always clear exactly why that’s happening. In Honeycomb’s new guide, Tracking Core Web Vitals with Honeycomb and Vercel, you can learn how to capture, analyze, and debug your real-world CWV performance using a free Honeycomb account.

How much does monitoring and observability actually cost us? We all collect logs, metrics, traces, and possibly other telemetry data. Yet, this can get expensive pretty quickly, especially in today’s microservices-based systems.

Wherever you read about observability, you are told that there are "3 pillars" of observability - Metrics, Traces and Logs. An image that is generally projected is something like this. But wait a minute, why are there only three pillars, and does it really matter to the end user? At the end of the day, users are just trying to solve their problems fast.