Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In the realm of modern software development practices, observability is no longer an optional add-on. It is a mission-critical capability. Like how control theory revolutionized industrial systems, and quality assurance redefined manufacturing processes, observability transforms the software systems and their development processes in many ways inspired by the brick-and-mortar industries. This post explores the best practices in modern observability to help you leverage its full potential.

Back in Alerts Are Fundamentally Messy, I made the point that the events we monitor are often fuzzy and uncertain. To make a distinction between what is valid or invalid as an event, context is needed, and since context doesn’t tend to exist within a metric, humans go around and validate alerts to add it. As such, humans are part of the alerting loop, and alerts can be framed as devices used to redirect our attention. In this post, I want to drive this concept a bit further.

There are a limited number of investments that a team can make in any given year and it can be daunting to choose the “right” ones. In R&D, there is always more to do. There is always more to research, design, build, fix, maintain, and improve. Spread across multiple domains, the possibilities multiply: we’re spoiled for choice—and, while inspiring, the breadth of possible investment areas can be overwhelming.

I’ve spent over 25 years in tech product marketing and customer support, working with pioneering companies like Dell/EMC, Apple, Keeper Security, and now, SolarWinds. In my current role, I’ve had the privilege of helping organizations of all sizes achieve comprehensive observability in their IT environments. I’ve also witnessed firsthand the challenges that can arise on this journey.

At Coroot, we started using eBPF to give users insights into their system performance without needing them to change code or redeploy services. This approach not only makes setup easier but also ensures full visibility, even for third-party and legacy services. To truly achieve this, though, the tool needs to support a wide range of application protocols. Coroot has long supported popular ones like HTTP, gRPC, Postgres, MySQL, Redis, Memcached, MongoDB, Kafka, and Cassandra.

Observability tools are crucial for maintaining the seamless performance and reliability of systems. Dynatrace has been one of the leading solutions for monitoring and observability over the past few years. However, there are many alternatives that provide similar features, often at more accessible price points and with unique capabilities. In this article, we will explore the best Dynatrace alternatives for 2025 to help you find the right fit for your organization.

We recently released Refinery 2.9, which came with great performance improvements. Reading through the release notes, I felt the need to write a piece on this improvement, as it’s quite important but easy to overlook: collect loop taking too long. This is the story of how we used distributed tracing to find the slowdown in this loop.