In the ever-evolving landscape of software development and IT operations, monitoring tools play a pivotal role in ensuring the performance, reliability, and availability of your applications. Two key disciplines in this domain are observability and Application Performance Management (APM). This post will help you understand the nuances between observability and APM, exploring their unique characteristics, similarities, benefits and differences.

This is the third and final blog post in a series about shifting Observability left. If you have not yet read the first two, you can find the first post here and the second post here. Observability is fundamental to modern software development, enabling developers to gain deep insights into their application’s behavior and performance.

The OpenTelemetry Collector is a core part of telemetry pipelines, which makes it one of the parts of your infrastructure that must be as secure as possible. The general advice from the OpenTelemetry teams is to build a custom Collector executable instead of using the supplied ones when you’re using it in a production scenario. However, that isn’t an easy task, and that prompted me to build something.

Digital transformation is at the core of media and entertainment organizations, it’s vital for these firms to constantly evolve to provide the best user experience to their customers. These companies must seek new and interesting content, services, and tailored offerings that enhance the audience’s experience and supply personalization. However, whilst these investments are essential to remain competitive, they’re also particularly costly.

From AI to OTel, 2023 was a transformative year for open source observability. While the advancements we made in open source observability will be a catalyst for our continued work in 2024, there is even more innovation on the horizon. We asked seven Grafanistas to share their predictions for which observability trends are on their “In” list for 2024. Here’s what they had to say.

Schools, universities and other organizations within higher education have been shifting to modernize their learning experiences. With the intake of new students each year, some of these being based remotely, these organizations are seeking to manage large-scale and highly distributed infrastructure.

For developers, understanding the performance of shipped code is crucial. Through the last decade, a tablestake function in software monitoring and observability solutions has been to save and track app metrics. Engineers love tools that get out of your way and just work, and the appeal of today’s best-in-class application performance monitoring (APM) suites lies in a seamless day zero experience with drop-in agent installs, button click integrations, and immediate metrics collection.