Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In digital systems, communications, apps and IT/operations, the terms alerts and notifications are often used somewhat interchangeably – but there are important distinctions. Understanding these differences helps design better user experiences, reduce overload, and improve response to critical issues. Here are some of the defining contrasts: A few concrete examples help illustrate.

Security expectations around data centres have changes, and it’s no longer enough to secure the perimeter or roll out a firewall policy. Today’s infrastructure relies on interconnected systems, from APIs and cloud endpoints to HVAC controls and building access tools, all of which can be targeted, misconfigured, or exploited.

The demands placed on digital infrastructure have changed. Businesses are adding locations, connecting to cloud platforms, or responding to changing compliance requirements. Rigid network contracts and fixed provider models no longer make operational sense. Carrier neutral data centres offer a different approach. By enabling provider choice, flexible routing, and integration on your terms, they give infrastructure teams more control, and more room to move.

Data centre energy use has become a critical factor in business infrastructure strategy. Once a background cost, it now plays a direct role in decisions about operational resilience, sustainability reporting, and future capacity planning. The scale of consumption is hard to ignore. Even smaller facilities can draw between 1 and 5 MW of continuous power, enough to supply thousands of homes. Larger hyperscale environments consume significantly more, 20 MW to over 100 MW of power.

Today, more than ever, organizations face a difficult balancing act: how to keep sensitive data fully under their control while still making it accessible and usable so teams can unlock the value and insights they need. Industries such as financial services, healthcare, and government agencies often must comply with strict regulations that require data to remain in environments they directly own and manage.

Way back in 2009, when I was serving as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army, I worked in a network operations center for a deployed Army unit. Our mission was to provide network connectivity across central and northern Iraq. Our observability tools were incredibly limited. We had a network map that would turn nodes and network links red, yellow, and green when they were up or down. We had to write down in a physical logbook any status changes and what we did about them.

As a Co-founder and CPO at Cribl, I'm genuinely stoked that our new federal suite, Cribl.Cloud Government, has achieved an “In Process” designation under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP). This isn’t any old milestone. We’re bringing all of Cribl’s kickass capabilities to government agencies, even those that require the strictest compliance and security standards. Because, who doesn’t love a good set of rules?

We recently delivered a webinar titled IT/OT Convergence: Proactive Threat Detection for Industrial Control Systems (also available via Brighttalk).

Modern IT environments are hybrid, distributed, and constantly growing. To keep them reliable, organizations rely on monitoring that scales, automates, and integrates seamlessly into existing workflows. We collected 24 Icinga customer stories from industries including finance, telecom, manufacturing, and public services. What unites them is the choice of Icinga as a flexible and cost-efficient alternative to proprietary monitoring tools.

Until recently, Grafana Mimir — our open source, horizontally scalable, multi-tenant time series database (TSDB) — has exclusively used Prometheus’ PromQL engine to evaluate queries. While the PromQL engine works great, it sometimes needs a lot of memory to run, specifically in the Mimir querier component. To address this memory consumption issue, we recently introduced Mimir Query Engine (MQE).