C# logs can be an invaluable resource for optimizing application performance and debugging errors. But it’s not easy to extract the full potential of your logs if they’re not providing enough context around each error, or if they’re written in a format that’s difficult to parse.

With the growing number of customers monitoring Azure in Datadog, we saw a great opportunity to help our users get faster visibility across their dynamic cloud environments. We’re happy to announce the release of new out-of-the-box dashboards for several Azure services.

Amazon MQ is a cloud-based, AWS-managed service for the popular Apache ActiveMQ message broker. It offers many advantages of being part of the AWS ecosystem as AWS automatically provisions and maintains infrastructure components from services including EC2 and EBS.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) is an orchestration service for Docker containers running within the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. You can declare the components of a container-based infrastructure, and ECS will deploy, maintain, and remove those components automatically. The resulting ECS cluster lends itself to a microservice architecture where containers are scaled and scheduled based on need.

In Part 1, we introduced a number of key metrics that you can use for ECS monitoring. Monitoring ECS involves paying attention to two levels of abstraction: the status of your services, tasks, and containers, as well as the resource use from the underlying compute and storage infrastructure, monitored per EC2 host or Docker container. In this post, we’ll survey some techniques you can use to monitor both levels of your ECS deployment.

As we explained in Part 1, it’s important to monitor task status and resource use at the level of ECS constructs like clusters and services, while also paying attention to what’s taking place within each host or container. In this post, we’ll show you how Datadog can help you: Automatically collect metrics from every layer of your ECS deployment, Track data from your ECS cluster, plus its hosts and running services in dashboards, and more.

The MEAN stack has become an increasingly popular choice for developing dynamic applications. Similar to other development stacks like LAMP and Ruby on Rails, MEAN bundles together complementary technologies to provide a ready-made framework for developing and serving applications.

If you are familiar with instrumenting applications, you may have heard of OpenMetrics, OpenTracing, and OpenCensus. These projects aim to create standards for application performance monitoring and collecting metric data. Although the projects do overlap in terms of their goals, they each take a different approach to observability and instrumentation.