Observability Platforms at a Glance: Which One Suits Your Needs Best?

Observability is a critical aspect of modern software development, providing teams with the ability to monitor and understand the performance of their applications and infrastructure. In recent years, several companies have emerged as leaders in the observability space, offering comprehensive solutions for monitoring and analytics. In this post, we’ll take a detailed look at five […]

What is observability?

Leading software vendors have completed the expansion from traditional monitoring to full observability. However, there’s still a knowledge gap for customers interested in observability. As a result, some are left feeling a bit cloudy about observability for the cloud. Hopefully, this article will help add clarity to this topic. What is observability? Explained So, observability […]

50 Top Observability and Monitoring Solutions – 2023

Back in 2014, I compiled a list of top server and application performance monitoring solutions. Sharing that list publicly was a great way to gain feedback and recommendations on other tools available. Over time that list grew from 20 to over 100 server monitoring and APM solutions! Because of its growing size, I’ve created a smaller, more […]

Top Serverless Monitoring Tools + Serverless Resources

Technology continues to evolve, and solutions for hosting applications continue to expand. One such method of application hosting that has been growing in popularity is serverless computing and, as a result, the increased demand for serverless monitoring. What is Serverless Computing? Serverless Computing is a cloud-computing execution model managed by cloud providers who run the […]

What is iowait and how does it affect Linux performance?

I/O wait or iowait, wait, wa, %iowait, or wait% is often displayed by command-line Linux system monitoring tools such as top, sar, atop, and others. On its own, it’s one of many performance stats that provide us insight into Linux system performance. I/O wait came up in a recent discussion with a new client. During our […]

MySQL Performance Tuning: Tips, Scripts and Tools

With MySQL, common configuration mistakes can create severe performance problems. If you misconfigure just one of the many config parameters, it can cripple performance. Of course, the performance of MySQL is often tied to the efficiency of your MySQL queries. It’s essential to ensure that your performance issues are not due to poorly written MySQL […]

PHP Monitoring Instrumentation for Laravel Web Artisans

Over the last decade, Laravel has evolved to become an elegant open-source web application framework that’s approachable for beginners and experts alike. There are multiple solutions available to instrument your application on your local dev box, staging, and production, and there are just as many options to monitor these instrumentations. While the Open Telemetry PHP […]

20 Leading Companies Share How COVID-19 is Accelerating the Future of APM

One year ago, I asked 12 of the leading providers of application performance monitoring (APM) and other SaaS-based monitoring services: what will the future of APM look like in 2020?  They pointed to the rise of AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations), Big Data, and Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) as the core advancements in this space. […]

How to Optimize Your Cloud Services Cost

In this blog post, we review some of the biggest risks behind increasing services cost and how to optimize cloud services cost with a proper application monitoring solution. As modern software deployments continue to break down into smaller and more modular units, the world is seeing more moving parts in the deployment equation. The drivers […]

Optimizing APM in the Cloud: A Retrospective Approach for Future Success

The growth and maturity of the cloud has required us, as tech pros, to manage an increasingly complex web of applications spanning on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. While this affords us greater flexibility, agility, and scalability day-to-day, these changes to how we deliver applications are making traditional monitoring techniques much more difficult (sometimes impossible), while […]