After 15 years working on SQL Server and believing the world revolved around databases, I came to SolarWinds where I could learn more about operational technology and its role in full-stack observability. I've had fun watching these two industries collide, delivering on the promise of better value for businesses. I recently read “End of Abundance in Tech” by Ben DeBow, and it encouraged me to think about what the next big market shift will mean for my industry.

Balancing growth and performance optimization is a constant tension in all aspects of business. This is particularly true in DevOps, where there’s a drive to release more features faster to out-pace the competition and a need to stabilize and optimize existing system performance to deliver the best user experience. Yet most DevOps budgets and resources are shrinking. With each release, teams are forced to make difficult trade-off decisions.

We’ve come a long way. 25 years ago, a network engineer had an idea. The tools he used to solve IT problems weren’t as simple or effective as he needed—and they didn’t work how he wanted them to work. So, to make his team’s daily routine a little easier, he created his own.

Technology investments in today’s digital economy are crucial in achieving your business goals and gaining a competitive edge. As business strategies evolve and technology advances, IT environments are becoming increasingly complex and hybrid while budgets remain stagnant. Choosing the right solution to manage your technology stack is vital to deliver superior application experiences and meet your performance, availability, and operational requirements.

In this post, we’ll embark on the journey of building a simple PHP single-page application that interacts with a MySQL database. We’ll integrate logging functionality on top of our application. Logging is a crucial aspect of any application—for providing insights into user behavior, tracking errors, and monitoring performance. We’ll start by walking through how to set up our application.

Observability has emerged as a distinct approach within the broader scope of IT management, enabling organizations to gain valuable insights into their complex IT ecosystems. By collecting and analyzing data from various sources, observability provides a holistic understanding of system behavior and performance, streamlining troubleshooting and optimization efforts.