In the ever-evolving IT landscape, new buzzwords and acronyms seem to emerge almost daily, each promising to revolutionize how we manage technology. One such term that’s gaining traction is Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms (SOAPs). You’ve probably seen the news by now: Gartner just released their latest Magic Quadrant for Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms.

Software as a Service (SaaS) is growing at a rapid rate with businesses increasingly reliant on cloud-based solutions. According to the 2024 State of SaaS Growth report, organisations globally now use an average of 371 SaaS applications. This surge in adoption means that IT leaders are tasked with managing a more complex environment, which comes with a suite of challenges. To ensure the performance, security and reliability of these services, network connectivity is critical.

Trust doesn’t just happen overnight. For us at incident.io, it’s been a journey—one that’s focused on people just as much as the product. From the start, we knew that building great incident management software wasn’t just about creating features and functionality. It was about building relationships, understanding our users, and truly being there for them when it matters most. Our focus has always been to help teams manage incidents better.

Refinery is Honeycomb’s sampling proxy, which our largest customers use to improve the value they get from their telemetry. It has a variety of interesting samplers to choose from. One category of these is called dynamic sampling. It’s basically a technique for adjusting sample rates to account for the volume of incoming data—but doing so in a way that rare events get more priority than common events. Honeycomb’s query engine can compensate for sampling rates on a per-event basis.

Collection agents emerged to alleviate the pain of having log files distributed around your application servers. However, they brought new problems since each log analysis tool wanted its own agent, trading in its own protocols and/or formats, usually targeting only a single use case. Meaning you had to install multiple agents for different use cases. Onboarding data and managing all these agents seems to be an afterthought.

Managing and discovering assets is critical for organizations of all sizes. The right asset discovery tool can provide visibility into your infrastructure, helping you maintain control over hardware, software, and network components. With an array of options available, selecting the tool that best fits your organization's needs can be challenging.

When managing an enterprise-level network, ensuring seamless synchronization between servers is crucial for maintaining consistency and security. That's where Repadmin, a command-line tool designed for diagnosing and managing Active Directory (AD) replication, comes into play. It is an essential tool for IT administrators working in Windows Server environments, providing deep insights into the health of replication processes within the network.

In Software development, code readability transforms complexity into clarity. Martin Fowler said: Code should be readable and manageable so other developers can understand and work without additional fatigue. .NET has many ways to enhance readability and manageability. This post will explore C#'s extension methods by listing five use cases that I use on all of the ASP.NET Core projects I'm working on.

Platform.sh was built on a set of core principles: positive impact, caring for others, fairness, aiming for the stars. Since 2015, our founders have followed their own true north, creating a cloud application platform and technologies that would make developers’ daily lives easier. Like most for-profit businesses, the leadership team sought marketplace differentiation. Revenue growth. Continuous innovation. But they wanted something more.

Let’s be honest: platform engineering is evolving fast, and a lot of teams are being forced to write the rules while still collecting context. Plenty of terms and topics are still up for debate—from, “Is this just DevOps 2.0?” to “How much abstraction is too much?" In this blog we pulled together 10 of the biggest topics being debated today. While we may not have all the answers, we think just getting up to speed on what's left to decide helps all of us get better.