Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

When Your Plant Talks Back: Conversational AI with InfluxDB 3

No one wants to stare at a plant and guess if it needs water. It’s much easier if the plant can say, “I’m thirsty.” A few years ago, we built Plant Buddy using InfluxDB Cloud 2.0. The linked article is still a great guide for cloud-first IoT prototyping as it shows how quickly you can connect devices, store time series data, and build dashboards in the cloud with the previous version of InfluxDB. But this time, the goal was different.

Expanding Uptime Monitoring Down The Stack: ICMP Monitors Are Now Available In Checkly

When we started building Checkly's uptime monitoring suite, the goal was to give engineering teams complete visibility across every layer of their stack, from application down to network, in one place. URL, TCP, DNS, and Heartbeat monitors covered a lot of that ground. But one fundamental piece was missing: the ability to simply ping a host and know if it's reachable.

Win by Being Bold

Everyone your sales team is reaching out to is drowning in emails. The way to cut through isn't to send more of them. It's to get personal, get creative, and get bold. That's the philosophy baked into incident.io's sales culture: experiment constantly, celebrate the inputs as much as the wins, and never play it safe. This video gives you a real look at what it's like to be part of a sales team at one of the most exciting startups right now. There are many more wins to come, and we want the right people here for them.

The data context gap: an evaluation guide for agent-ready infrastructure

Why do AI agents that look brilliant in a sandbox fail the moment they hit production? For platform leaders, the answer is a lack of environmental parity: the ability to interact with the exact data state and service topology where the actual bugs live. When an agent attempts to modify a schema, optimize a query, or reproduce a bug without access to the real-world data state, it hits the Data Context Gap.

Olly for SREs: 3 ways I actually use it in production

There’s a moment after an alert where you’re not fixing anything yet. You’re trying to answer a much simpler question: Is it actually down? Sometimes it’s obvious. Sometimes it’s 20 alerts at once with no clear starting point. Sometimes it’s a small upstream degradation that might cascade. Sometimes it’s just a spike that resolves on its own. That first phase is orientation. Is the signal real or transient? Is it isolated or spreading? Root cause or symptom?

How Techdome accelerates AI-led product delivery with Civo Kubernetes

Accessing cloud infrastructure shouldn’t slow down product innovation. Yet for many engineering teams building AI-driven platforms, traditional hyperscalers often introduce unnecessary complexity, high costs, and slow provisioning cycles. At Civo, we’ve seen a different approach emerge. Our cloud platform enables teams to move faster with Kubernetes, compute, and networking designed for simplicity and speed.

How to stop guessing where developer friction lives

Most platform teams know friction is a problem. They also struggle to figure out exactly where that friction lives. Developers lose time in ways that rarely show up on a roadmap. In many organizations, creating a new service can require multiple approvals and several Slack threads. Spinning up infrastructure can mean filing a ticket and waiting days. Onboarding to a new codebase involves a scavenger hunt through stale Confluence pages. None of these feel like emergencies in isolation.

Unlocking the Power of SolarWinds Through Training - SolarWinds TechPod 107

In this SolarWinds TechPod episode, hosts Chrystal Taylor and Sean Sebring talk with Cheryl Nomanson, a SolarWinds Academy trainer with 14 years at the company. They discuss the importance of technical education for complex software and networks, exploring SolarWinds' comprehensive training offerings including the SolarWinds Academy with its on-demand courses, instructor-led virtual classes, and office hours format. Cheryl explains the SolarWinds Certified Professional (SCP) certification program and the newer SolarWinds Certified Instructor (SCI) program for training partners globally.

The best observability platforms for developers

At some point, logs stop being enough. As applications grow more distributed, understanding what's actually happening in production becomes harder. That's what observability platforms are built for. The hard part is figuring out which one is actually right for your application — and your budget. This guide covers some popular options: what they do well, where they fall short, and who they're for.