Tracing, according to Lightstep CTO and co-founder Daniel ‘Spoons’ Spoonhower, provides context, which serves as the backbone for what’s happening when an application’s performance degrades. “Tracing is really just understanding causal relationships in your software,” he explained. “It sounds obvious in retrospect, but using causal relationships to form the way that data is collected, analyzed … continue reading
Application performance monitoring is more important than ever, due to the rising complexity of software applications, architectures and the infrastructure that runs them. When monitoring tools first were developed, the systems they were looking at were fairly simple — it was a monolithic application, running in a corporate-owned data center, on one network. The idea … continue reading
According to research recently published by Digital Enterprise Journal, organizations are losing $2,129,000 per month, on average, due to delays in application releases. This creates a tough choice for development teams, who are depending on fresh logs and metrics from those releases to guide their data-driven development processes forward. In other words, there’s what I like … continue reading
Cindy Sridharan’s popular “Distributed Systems Observability” book published by O’Reilly claims that logs, metrics, and traces are the three pillars of observability. According to Sridharan, an event log is a record of events that contains both a timestamp and payload of content. Event logs come in three forms: Plaintext: A log record stored in plaintext … continue reading
Observability is the latest evolution of application performance monitoring, enabling organizations to get a view into CI/CD pipelines, microservices, Kubernetes, edge devices and cloud and network performance, among other systems. While being able to have this view is important, handling all the data these systems throw off can be a huge challenge for organizations. In … continue reading
Monitoring your applications comes in many forms. There’s traditional application performance management, which begat AIOps, which begat observability. But are there really any differences? If so, where are they? Some believe these are marketing terms used to differentiate tools. Others point to it as more of an evolution of monitoring. All that said, the performance … continue reading
Microsoft announced the .NET 5.0 Preview 2, which contains a set of smaller features and performance improvements. This includes code quality improvements in RyuJIT and changes to the garbage collector. The company said it is continuing to work on bigger features for the 5.0, some of which are starting to show up as initial designs … continue reading
Instana today announced the acquisition of three companies that it says adds up to its vision to create an observability tool for modern cloud applications. The three companies Instana acquired are StackImpact, a production-grade profiler; Signify, a tool for understanding the health of microservices; and BeeInstant, a scalable and performant real-time back end for customized … continue reading
