Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

We're excited to announce one of our most frequently requested features: inverted DNS checks. This new capability allows you to detect when DNS records are created (whether they're planned infrastructure changes or rogue records) and prevent unwanted values from appearing in your DNS configuration.

Before 2022, Alex Hanna worked on Google’s Ethical AI team. Today, she’s the director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute, a transition sparked by Google’s handling of a paper exposing AI’s growing environmental footprint. So, how bad is it, really? That depends on who you ask. Take Jesse Dodge, a senior research analyst at the Allen Institute for AI. Jesse told NPR that a single ChatGPT query can use as much electricity as keeping a light bulb on for 20 minutes.

On Oct. 20, the Internet woke up and seemingly chose violence. For more than 12 hours, Amazon Web Services (AWS) went down. From banking platforms to hospital communications to mobile ordering apps, digital services came to a screeching halt. The cause? Two programs are trying to write a DNS entry simultaneously, failing, and leaving the entry blank. Thus began the incredibly costly failure cascade.

Getting started with monitoring for Microsoft Azure environments can be a lengthy and manual process. Many tools require users to create app registrations, assign permissions, and enable log forwarding or telemetry data collection across multiple portals and scripts. These fragmented steps slow down onboarding and introduce opportunities for misconfiguration, making it harder for teams to quickly achieve full visibility.

When an application slows down or fails, pinpointing the cause isn’t always simple. Is it a backend regression, a misbehaving API, or a bottleneck somewhere deep in the network? Without full visibility, teams waste precious time troubleshooting across disconnected tools and layers. Datadog Synthetic Monitoring now supports Network Path to help you proactively identify whether user-facing issues stem from your code or from the underlying network.

Building and shipping an application is exciting, you watch your idea come alive and reach users. But once it’s out there, your real job begins: keeping it alive. An app in production isn’t just code running, it’s a living system. It needs monitoring to stay healthy and alerting to warn when something’s off. But there’s a catch: too few alerts, and you’ll miss real issues; too many, and you’ll drown in noise.

Application configs change over time, often in small ways that are easy to miss. They may start simple — a few environment variables, one exporter, nothing unexpected. As your instrumentation grows, you add rules for filtering health check spans, adjust sampling based on attributes, or introduce environment-specific resource settings. Each change makes sense on its own. But months later, the picture can look different across dev, staging, and production.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) means many things to many people. At its core, it enables developers to diagnose why their applications are slow and helps them provide a better experience to their users. Traditionally, this is accomplished by collecting a lot of data and displaying it in the form of dashboards and request traces. The problems you're trying to solve are generally known up front.

Microsoft Teams is one of the most popular tools for work communication today. Whether you're chatting with your team, jumping on a video call, or sharing files, it helps keep everyone connected. But let's face it – MS Teams isn’t perfect. You’ve probably run into issues like calls dropping, bad audio, or slow Teams performance. These problems can be frustrating, especially when you’re in the middle of an important meeting or deadline.

Almost all companies have some kind of online presence, and if yours doesn’t, it definitely should. In order to make a splash online, your business needs content, webpages, photos, documents, PDFs, videos, you name it. How do you keep track of all the various media? Where do you store it and back it up? What’s the most convenient and safe way to collaborate and share it with employees and freelancers? Enter all-in-one cloud storage services for businesses like Dropbox and Box.