Best of Observability — June 2025

  1. 1
    Article
    Avatar of last9Last9·42w

    11 Best Log Monitoring Tools for Developers in 2025

    A comprehensive comparison of 11 log monitoring tools for developers in 2025, covering solutions from simple centralized logging (Papertrail) to enterprise-scale platforms (Datadog, Dynatrace). The guide evaluates each tool's strengths, limitations, pricing, and ideal use cases, while providing practical advice on choosing the right solution based on team size, log volume, and technical requirements. Key tools covered include Last9, Better Stack, Grafana Loki, Elastic Stack, and others, with emphasis on real-world implementation considerations like structured logging, query performance, and cost optimization.

  2. 2
    Article
    Avatar of hnHacker News·43w

    CI/CD Observability with OpenTelemetry - A Step by Step Guide

    OpenTelemetry can provide comprehensive observability for CI/CD pipelines by capturing traces and metrics from GitHub Actions workflows. The setup involves configuring the OpenTelemetry Collector with a GitHub receiver that ingests webhook events as traces and scrapes repository metrics via GitHub APIs. This approach enables end-to-end visibility, performance optimization, error detection, and dependency analysis for CI/CD pipelines, replacing traditional ad-hoc monitoring methods with a unified observability framework.

  3. 3
    Article
    Avatar of freecodecampfreeCodeCamp·43w

    How to Debug CI/CD Pipelines: A Handbook on Troubleshooting with Observability Tools

    A comprehensive guide to implementing observability in CI/CD pipelines using free and open-source tools. Covers setting up Grafana Loki and lightweight ELK stacks for log aggregation, creating unified logging strategies with correlation IDs, writing advanced LogQL and KQL queries for troubleshooting, integrating Prometheus metrics with logs, and building Grafana dashboards. Includes practical examples for debugging common pipeline failures like build errors, dependency issues, and flaky tests across GitHub Actions, Jenkins, and GitLab.

  4. 4
    Article
    Avatar of milanjovanovicMilan Jovanović·43w

    Monitoring .NET Applications with OpenTelemetry and Grafana

    Learn how to implement comprehensive observability for .NET applications using OpenTelemetry and Grafana Cloud. The guide covers installing OpenTelemetry packages, configuring automatic instrumentation for ASP.NET Core, Entity Framework, and other libraries, setting up OTLP export to Grafana Cloud, and viewing traces and logs in unified dashboards. This setup provides distributed tracing, log correlation, and monitoring capabilities that scale from single services to complex microservice architectures.

  5. 5
    Article
    Avatar of kodekloudKodeKloud's Squad·44w

    Periodic Table of Cloud & DevOps Tools

    A comprehensive visual guide showcasing 80+ DevOps and cloud tools organized across 12 domains, highlighting how the DevOps landscape has evolved beyond traditional tools like Jenkins and Docker. The guide emphasizes modern practices including GitOps workflows, built-in security, platform engineering, comprehensive observability, and cloud-native architectures. Rather than mastering all tools, the recommendation is to understand one tool per category and its role in the broader ecosystem.

  6. 6
    Article
    Avatar of communityCommunity Picks·45w

    ClickStack: High-Performance Open-Source Observability

    ClickStack is a high-performance, open-source observability solution built on ClickHouse that unifies logs, metrics, traces, and session replays. It offers sub-second query performance on high-cardinality data with 10-100x cost savings through efficient compression. Companies like Sony LIV use it to monitor streaming services in real-time, processing tens of millions of events while optimizing costs and ensuring high availability.

  7. 7
    Article
    Avatar of grafanaGrafana Labs·43w

    Configure and customize Kubernetes Monitoring easier with Alloy Operator

    Grafana Labs introduces version 3.0 of the Kubernetes Monitoring Helm chart featuring Alloy Operator, which simplifies configuration by dynamically setting up telemetry data collection based on selected features. The new approach reduces the massive values.yaml file from nearly 3,000 lines and eliminates complex subchart management. Key improvements include automatic configuration of Alloy collectors when features are enabled, built-in tail sampling support for distributed tracing, and dynamic deployment of required Alloy instances. The operator uses Helm-based architecture to manage Alloy objects while maintaining security through proper encapsulation and minimal permissions.

  8. 8
    Article
    Avatar of grafanaGrafana Labs·44w

    Grafana Tempo 2.8 release: memory improvements, new TraceQL features, and more

    Grafana Tempo 2.8 introduces significant memory improvements for compactors, reducing memory usage by over 50% in high-traffic environments. New TraceQL features include query hints for retrieving most recent results, parent span ID searches, sum_over_time metrics function, and topk/bottomk functions for better cardinality control. The release includes breaking changes such as removal of serverless features, default HTTP port change from 80 to 3200, and configuration parameter renaming. Future developments include RF1 rearchitecture rollout and LLM integration through a Tempo MCP server.

See all Observability archives