Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Network operators across the digital ecosystem are under pressure to cut costs while protecting revenue. This post explores three practical use cases where Kentik Traffic Costs helps turn traffic insight into commercial intelligence that helps teams negotiate smarter, protect margins, and boost profitability.

For years, compliance has been synonymous with checklists, manual reporting, and time-consuming audits. That definition no longer holds. In our September 2025 webinar, Patrick Hubbard, Technical Marketing Director, led a conversation with JB Baker, Vice President of Product Engineering, and Marc Jensen, Channel Sales Engineer. Together, they showed how automation is transforming compliance into something far more strategic: the foundation of modern resilience.

The world of software development has fundamentally changed. We've moved from monthly releases to continuous delivery measured in minutes, and the rise of AI means velocity is no longer just a goal—it's a requirement for survival. But this relentless speed has exposed a critical flaw in how we approach observability. The industry relies on a "store first, ask questions later" model where you collect every log, metric, and trace, and then hope to find the root cause when something breaks.

Today’s software organizations can’t make tradeoffs between speed and trust – you need both to succeed. But juggling them is tough. Moving too fast can lead to security vulnerabilities and compliance issues, while moving too slow means your competitors beat you to market. This tension creates friction that slows down every release, a problem that is rooted in your software pipeline.

InfluxDB 3.5 is now available for both Core and Enterprise, along with updates to the new Explorer UI that make it easier to save, organize, and query your data. This release highlights the biggest updates since our 3.4 release, including Explorer Dashboards in beta, new cache querying capabilities, and stronger operational tools for managing clusters. InfluxDB 3 Core is free and open source, optimized for recent data, and licensed under MIT and Apache 2.

Releasing new features is one of the highest-stakes moments in the software delivery life cycle. Even with CI/CD pipelines in place, plenty of things can still go wrong when a feature goes live for actual users. Most feature flagging tools operate in isolation from important observability tooling, forcing engineers to monitor changes across multiple disconnected systems to fully understand their impact. This slows down development and increases the chance of missing critical issues.

For the longest time, observability was centered around logs, metrics, and traces, but the growth of more complex systems has made continuous profiling another essential part of maintaining healthy systems. It provides insights into resource usage and latency down to the code level, delivering key insights to improve performance.

My wife and I spent hours this summer at home digging in the dirt. We planted new shrubs and perennials and created a small vegetable garden. We spread many square yards of fresh topsoil and grass seed over areas of lawn that needed rejuvenation. It turns out, I should have done all that landscaping with a FinOps leader’s mindset — before my water bill tripled when I wasn’t looking.

IT leaders know the drill. An alert storm rolls in and the tickets pile up. Your team scrambles to piece together root causes before service degradation kicks in. But the firefighting rages on, even when you have enough dashboards, monitoring, and alerts to light up a Christmas tree. Enterprise leaders need to quit burning budget on shiny dashboards that look good in the boardroom but do nothing to stop outages in the real world.

Serverless computing with Node.js is transforming how applications are built and scaled by removing the need to manage servers. However, serverless functions run for short durations and scale dynamically, making traditional monitoring ineffective. Effective monitoring is essential to track performance, detect errors, optimize cold starts, and control costs.