Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Lightrun, the continuous debugging and observability company, today announced the release of a free, self-service version of its popular debugging solution for developers. Lightrun Cloud is not only the most powerful debugger a developer can use to troubleshoot production applications live from within the IntelliJ IDE – but also the easiest to set-up, with a complete self-service experience that gets developers up and running in less than five minutes.

Why do organizations invest in observability? Because it adds value. Sometimes we forget this when we’re building our observability solutions. We get so excited about what we’re tracking that we can lose sight of why we’re tracking it. Technical metrics reveal how systems react to change. What they don’t give is a picture of how change impacts the broader business goals. The importance of qualitative data in business observability is often overlooked.

A selection of live questions and answers from the audience of our recent webinar on how site reliability engineers can best leverage intelligent observability to monitor SLIs and SLOs, prioritize reliability over functionality, and more.

By 2022, Gartner estimates that more than 3 out of 4 global organizations will be running containerized applications in production. With this comes a new set of monitoring challenges — ephemeral, short-lived infrastructure, complex service interdependencies and on-call developers who now need access to data for fast troubleshooting, just to name a few.

The concept of unified IT observability has gained newfound importance in today’s world of remote work, hybrid infrastructures, and technological convergence. In this video, Christina Kosmowski, President at LogicMonitor, shares five tips on how to power your business forward and achieve unified IT observability during uncertain times.

Kafka is a distributed, highly available event streaming platform which can be run on bare metal, virtualized, containerized, or as a managed service. At its heart, Kafka is a publish/subscribe (or pub/sub) system, which provides a "broker" to dole out events. Publishers post events to topics, and consumers subscribe to topics. When a new event is sent to a topic, consumers that subscribe to the topic will receive a new event notification.

IT Operations teams are often the bedrock of the digital business, ensuring that processes and services continue humming smoothly as developers continue to evolve and increase customer value. But increasingly complex systems can flood them with alerts that get in the way of operators from doing their best work and paving the way for new, innovative services.

There is an idea of the relationship between observability and monitoring, that they complement each other in an inseparable way. While true that you can only monitor a system that is observable, the line dividing observability and monitoring grows narrower with every deployment you make; making these two practices less of a pairing and more a single entity.

Software companies are in a constant pursuit to optimize their delivery flow and increase release velocity. But as they get better at CI/CD in the spirit of “move fast and break things,” they are also being forced to have a very sobering conversation about “how do we fix all those things we’ve been breaking so fast?” As a result, today’s cloud-native world is fraught with production errors, and in dire need of observability.

The current landscape of what our customers are dealing with in monitoring and observability can be a bit of a mess. For one thing, there are varying expectations and implementations when it comes to observability data. For another, most customers have to lean on a hodgepodge of tools that might blend open source and proprietary, require extensive onboarding as team members have to learn which tools are used for what, and have a steep learning curve in general.