Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Ubuntu Pro isn’t just for enterprises – it’s for the passionate community that powers and supports open source every day. From secure remote access to homelab hardening, Ubuntu Pro helps users get more from their systems, whether at work or at home. In this series, we talk to real users about how they use Ubuntu Pro in their personal and professional lives. We begin with Marc Grondin, a longtime Linux user and Ubuntu Pro subscriber based in Quebec, Canada.

In cybersecurity, defense-in-depth is a fundamental principle – you never rely on a single security measure to protect your systems. The same philosophy applies to application monitoring. No single monitoring approach, no matter how sophisticated, can capture every possible failure mode of your application. This is why layered monitoring isn't just a best practice – it's essential risk mitigation.

As modern infrastructure grows more dynamic and distributed, collecting logs alongside metrics becomes a critical part of any observability strategy. To make this easy and powerful, MetricFire now supports a direct logging pipeline using Grafana Loki. This allows you to forward system logs from your servers to Hosted Graphite's Loki backend and visualize them in your Hosted Grafana dashboards with full control over queries, filtering, and alerting.

This is the second post in a series examining the requirements necessary to achieve operational excellence. Did you miss the first post? You can find it here. Maintaining continuous uptime and resolving issues swiftly has never been more critical in the rapidly changing digital operations landscape. Automation must become the industry standard, yet the distinction between native process automation and reliance on external tools has a significant impact on operational efficiency and responsiveness.

I'm pleased to share that we've can now notify you via Google Chat. Here's what that looks like: Our Google Chat notifications include: You can read more on how to set up Google Chat notifications in our docs. Of course, we also offer numerous other channels to notify you when something is wrong with your site. I'm pleased to share that we've can now notify you via Google Chat.

Apache Kafka has become the go-to platform for organizations handling high-throughput, real-time data streaming. Its ability to manage massive data volumes while ensuring reliability is second to none. However, as businesses grow and demand for data increases, scaling Kafka isn’t always a walk in the park. It often comes with its own set of challenges that can throw even the most seasoned teams for a loop.

As power-hungry workloads like AI and HPC become the norm, data centers face mounting pressure to rethink their thermal strategies. Traditional air cooling has long been the industry standard, but with rising rack densities and energy costs, many operators are exploring liquid cooling as a more efficient alternative. In 2024, the global liquid cooling market was valued around $4.18 billion and is projected to reach $13.2 billion by 2029.

With grafana/otel-lgtm, observability is just one Docker command away. Over the past year, grafana/otel-lgtm has simplified observability setups, helping developers get a complete OpenTelemetry stack running in under five seconds. With integrations for metrics, logs, traces, and now profiles via Grafana Pyroscope, it has become a go-to solution for demos, development, and testing, as evidenced by its growing community (1k stars on GitHub and growing!) and notable adopters.

Sometimes the biggest transformations begin with what sounds like the worst possible news. One day, this Fortune 500 technology company’s observability platform was running smoothly. The next, they learned their critical monitoring solution would be discontinued as part of a corporate buyout. For a leading global IT vendor in data infrastructure serving customers across storage, cloud, and managed services, this was a potential catastrophe.

Writing code is easier than ever. We want to make deleting code just as easy – introducing Reaper for iOS and Android. Reaper was an Emerge Tools product that helped companies like Duolingo delete 1% of their iOS codebase. And just like with Emerge Tools’ Launch Booster, we’re making Reaper open-source for anyone to use. In this post, we’ll explain what Reaper is, why you should care about dead code, and how Reaper works on both platforms.