As an IT professional or network administrator, you understand the critical importance of maintaining a smooth and efficient network. LAN congestion can be a silent disruptor, causing significant slowdowns and affecting the productivity of your entire team. Imagine trying to navigate through a traffic jam on your way to an important meeting – frustrating, isn't it? This is precisely what LAN congestion feels like for your network.

SD-WAN has revolutionized how organizations optimize network performance and enhance connectivity across geographically dispersed locations. However, to fully capitalize on the benefits of SD-WAN, it is crucial organizations implement robust operational and monitoring practices. This is especially important given the growing operational and security challenges associated with the rising popularity of cloud-based services and SaaS applications.

Measuring progress in software development is hard. Our industry is defined by complexity, entropy, shifting deadlines and priorities, and customer expectations that evolve almost as quickly as the technology that we use every day. The nature of this environment means that we need to apply continuous feedback loops, robust frameworks and structured approaches to do good work.

Cloud migration–often also referred to as digital transformation or cloud modernization–is a critical process organizations undertake to enhance their IT infrastructure. Whether moving from traditional data centers to the public cloud (“lift and shift”) or transitioning from public cloud VMs to PaaS services (“refactoring”), cloud migration presents a set of common challenges that can impact project success.

For years, we’ve been hearing about the dangers of Bisphenol-A (BPA). “Ditch any products with BPA in them,” we’ve repeatedly been told. So, we diligently check the labels of our canned goods, plastic food storage containers, and water bottles. We may even check our cookware, beauty products and other items that touch consumables. But that’s not enough. Though some governments have banned the use of BPA in recent years, not all do.

One of the biggest advantages of the OpenTelemetry project is its vendor neutrality — something that many community members appreciate, especially if they’ve spent huge amounts of time migrating from one commercial vendor to another. Vendor neutrality also happens to be a core element of our big tent philosophy here at Grafana Labs. We realize, however, that this neutrality can have its limits when it comes to real-world use cases.

Get a quick overview of Day 1 at PromCon 2024, which featured significant announcements on Prometheus 3.0 and OpenTelemetry compatibility.

This cheat sheet provides practical guidance for diagnosing issues and understanding trends.