Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

GTMetrix used to be the go-to tool for checking website speed, but let’s be honest—paying for one-off synthetic tests isn’t worth it. If you’re still relying on synthetic testing alone, you’re missing a big part of the web performance picture. If you care about Core Web Vitals, SEO performance, and user experience, you need more than just lab data. The good news? There are better (and free) alternatives like PageSpeed Insights and WebPageTest for synthetic testing.

Modern applications are becoming increasingly complex, and debugging distributed systems can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. This is where OpenTelemetry (OTel) comes in. If you're using NestJS, integrating OpenTelemetry can provide deep insights into your application's behavior, helping you track performance, troubleshoot issues, and understand service interactions.

Logging is an integral part of any production-ready Node.js application. Whether you're debugging issues, monitoring application performance, or setting up a centralized logging system, an efficient logger is crucial. Pino is one of the best choices available due to its speed, low overhead, and powerful features. This guide goes beyond the basics, providing an in-depth exploration of how to optimize Pino for your applications, use advanced features, and integrate it seamlessly with other tools.

If you've been working with Elasticsearch for a while, you’ll eventually run into a situation where you need to reindex your data. Maybe you’re changing mappings, upgrading versions, or restructuring your documents. That’s where the Elasticsearch Reindex API comes in. In this guide, we'll walk through everything you need to know about the Reindex API—what it is, how it works, common use cases, performance optimizations, and potential pitfalls. Let’s dive in.

We’re excited to introduce a new feature that gives you greater control over how and when you receive alerts from your website and ping monitors. With Alert sensitivity, you can now specify the number of retries before an alert is triggered, reducing false alarms and ensuring more reliable notifications.

As IT environments become more complex, larger, and inundated with data, DevOps teams encounter significant obstacles that make efficient operations more challenging. The heightened complexity can create difficulties in maintaining visibility and control across hybrid IT ecosystems. Additionally, the substantial volume of data generated can overwhelm resource-constrained DevOps teams, making it difficult to extract valuable insights and make informed decisions.

Valkey is a new database management system that is gaining traction. Valkey is a fork of Redis, and it is available as a deb package in the Ubuntu 24.04 release. You can install it by simply running sudo apt install valkey. We also offer a Valkey container to allow you to run a secure, compliant and long-term supported Valkey on top of any Linux distribution.

Entra ID is the new name for Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), Microsoft’s cloud-based identity and access management service. This rebranding, announced in July 2023, is part of Microsoft’s broader Entra product family, which focuses on securing access to digital resources and managing identities in a comprehensive way.

On February 25, 2025, at 11:32 AM EST, Martello’s Vantage DX monitoring began alerting on an issue affecting Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD SSO). While Microsoft had not yet acknowledged the incident, online reddit forums had noted the issue and our Vantage DX proactive monitoring detected disruptions impacting authentication across multiple workloads. See here the critical warning for Exchange in Vantage DX Monitoring. Here is the critical warning for OneDrive and SharePoint in Vantage DX.

AWS NAT Gateways are essential for private subnet access but can quickly become a costly burden, even when idle. With Kentik, cloud and network engineers gain deep visibility into NAT Gateway traffic, allowing them to identify underutilized gateways, analyze high-cost usage, and explore cost-saving alternatives like VPC Endpoints, Internet Gateways, or direct peering.