Monitoring
Browse all articles, tutorials, and guides about Monitoring
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What Keeps a Neon Compute Awake, and What It Costs
We watched Neon computes through the API to see which clients stop scale to zero. Idle connections do not. An open transaction, a monitoring agent and a health check every 5 minutes do, and that health check keeps the smallest compute running 180 CU-hours a month.
Datadog Alternatives in 2026: 12 Tools, Their Real Prices, and What 300 GB of Logs Costs on Each
We read the pricing page of Datadog and 12 alternatives on the same day and priced one workload on each: 300 GB of logs a month. Datadog with standard indexing of every event is $780 to $1,155 a month; the alternatives we could price run from about $19 to $180. Here is each tool, who it suits, and the catch on its pricing page.
Your Logs Cost More Than the Service That Emits Them
Log ingestion is priced per gigabyte and indexing is priced per event, which means a service emitting small lines pays far more than its byte count suggests. Here is the arithmetic on a real server, why the usual advice to "log less" misses, and the five levers that actually move the bill.
Distributed Tracing with OpenTelemetry: From Instrumentation to Visualization
A walkthrough of instrumenting a real service with OpenTelemetry, running the Collector, and finding the slow span in Jaeger when a request hops across five microservices.
SLOs, SLIs, and Error Budgets: A Practical Implementation Guide
Your service went down at 2 AM and nobody could agree on whether it was "bad enough" to page someone. SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets fix that. Here is how to define, measure, and act on them with real Prometheus queries and alerting rules.
The 5-Minute Kubernetes Cluster Health Check
Learn how to quickly assess your Kubernetes cluster's health with essential commands and catch issues before they become critical problems.
A Day in the Life of a DevOps Engineer
Follow a DevOps engineer through a typical day - from morning deployments to midnight hotfixes. Real challenges, real solutions, and real impact on business operations.
Increasing the Maximum Number of TCP/IP Connections in Linux and Monitoring Network Usage
Find the limit you actually hit, then raise it: file descriptors, the ephemeral port range, listen backlogs, TIME_WAIT and connection tracking. Then watch bandwidth per process, per connection and per interface with nethogs, iftop, nload and ss.