July 17, 2025
Why Do We Need Centralized Logging? Making Sense of Log Chaos
We’ve already discussed the importance of metrics monitoring for understanding the health of your IT infrastructure. But metrics are only part of the picture. To truly understand what’s happening inside your systems and applications, you need logs.
Logs are records of events generated by operating systems, applications, network devices, and nearly any software component. They capture what, when, where, and why something happened. Think of them as the “black box” of your infrastructure — an invaluable source of information for debugging, auditing, and incident investigation.
July 16, 2025
In our series on monitoring systems, we’ve reviewed Munin, Prometheus with Grafana, and Zabbix. Now it’s time to talk about a solution that addresses one of the main pain points of Prometheus users — long-term, scalable, and efficient time-series storage. Meet VictoriaMetrics, a high-performance and cost-effective TSDB (time-series database) that perfectly complements the Prometheus ecosystem when paired with Grafana for visualization.
What Is VictoriaMetrics and Why Do You Need It?
Prometheus handles real-time monitoring and storage well, but its built-in TSDB isn’t designed for long-term retention or scaling to terabytes or petabytes of data. That’s where VictoriaMetrics comes in.
July 15, 2025
We’ve already looked at Munin for basic insights and Prometheus + Grafana for cloud environments. Now let’s turn to Zabbix — a powerful, versatile, and scalable monitoring system that offers a comprehensive out-of-the-box solution for medium and large infrastructures. Zabbix is often chosen by organizations needing centralized monitoring, flexible alerting, and a wide range of data collection methods.
What Is Zabbix and How Does It Work?
Zabbix is a mature open-source monitoring system designed to track the state and performance of various IT components: servers, virtual machines, network devices, databases, web services, and applications.
July 14, 2025
We’ve reviewed Munin as a simple solution for basic monitoring. Now let’s move on to a stack that has become an indispensable tool in the world of modern cloud infrastructure, microservices, and containers: Prometheus, Node Exporter, and Grafana. This trio provides a powerful, flexible, and scalable approach to collecting, storing, analyzing, and visualizing metrics.
What is Prometheus and Its Ecosystem?
Prometheus is an open-source monitoring system originally developed at Google and later handed over to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Its key feature is the “pull” model: Prometheus scrapes metrics from targets via HTTP endpoints.
July 9, 2025
Introduction to Plesk
Plesk is another global leader in web hosting control panels, often competing with cPanel for the top spot. What makes Plesk stand out is its modularity, flexibility, and focus not only on traditional hosting but also on web developers, agencies, and DevOps teams. Plesk supports a wide range of operating systems, including both Linux and Windows Server, making it an extremely versatile solution. Like cPanel, Plesk is a commercial product with various licenses depending on needs.