Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Stop guessing on AI hardware. This DevOps guide details when to use TPUs vs. GPUs for optimal performance, cost, and framework compatibility in MLOps.

Every leap forward in technology begins with a question that feels almost human in its curiosity. In this series, we’re examining those questions, the ones that reveal where intelligence meets intention. If data was the foundation of understanding in our first conversation, automation is where that understanding begins to act.

At some point in the last few decades, every enterprise convinced itself that the humble FAQ page was going to save IT. If you could just document everything (every how-to, every troubleshooting step, every tribal data nugget living in someone’s head) you could finally stop the ticket flood. The idea was for employees to self-service and avoid escalating to engineers while freely sharing knowledge across a de-siloed ecosystem. But of course, that’s not what actually happened.

Healthcare contact centers spend an average of US$13.9M annually, with labor absorbing nearly half of this cost. Yet 7% of patients abandon interactions before reaching an agent, and most issues, coverage checks, refills, wayfinding, and status updates should never have reached a person in the first place. The core problem is structural. Every handoff between portals, call centers, apps, and clinical systems breaks context. Every break forces the patient to repeat information, wait longer, and lose trust.

SSL certificates are critical for securing websites, web applications, and APIs. They encrypt data in transit, verify server authenticity, and build user trust. However, SSL certificates have a limited lifespan, typically ranging from 90 days to one year. When a certificate expires, visitors encounter security warnings, some services stop working, and it can affect search engine rankings. Monitoring SSL certificate expiration is essential to maintain secure and uninterrupted online services.

APIs form the operational backbone of SaaS platforms. They authenticate users, deliver application data, process transactions, and connect multiple services into a cohesive ecosystem. When an API slows down or fails, the impact is immediate: login delays, frozen dashboards, broken customer workflows, and degraded user experience. For DevOps teams, this means monitoring must go far beyond checking status codes.

In my previous posts, we discussed the where and the how of managing your ML assets. We showed you how JFrog Artifactory acts as a powerful, universal model registry (the “where”) and how the FrogML SDK serves as the gateway to get your models and metadata into it (the “how”). Now, let’s talk about the why.

Monitoring starts with data, but action depends on timely alerts. When an alerting workflow relies on scheduled queries or external checks, engineers miss short windows where values shift and conditions form. The alerting plugin closes that gap by evaluating alert rules inside InfluxDB 3 as new values arrive, enabling faster detection and more responsive monitoring.

Start with distributed tracing to find which service is slow, then use continuous profiling to see why the code is slow, and finally apply high-cardinality analysis to identify which users or conditions trigger the problem. It's 2 AM. Your phone buzzes. Users are reporting timeouts. The metrics dashboard shows p99 latency spiking from 200ms to 4 seconds, but everything looks normal—CPU at 60%, memory stable, no error spikes. A quick pod restart helps briefly, then latency climbs right back up.

The financial service industry has spent years modernising their software delivery pipelines. Build and test cycles are fast, infrastructure is automated, and engineering capability is no longer the bottleneck. The slowdown now occurs at the end of the process: the last mile, where a change must prove it is safe before it can enter production. This final step is governed by a trust layer with people in it.