Resources

Guides, tutorials, and insights to help you master observability.

Webinar – What's New with the PostgreSQL Plug-in for Oracle Enterprise Manager
Upcoming Webinar

Webinar – What's New with the PostgreSQL Plug-in for Oracle Enterprise Manager

September 23, 2026 at 1:00 PM ET. The new advisory capabilities — Plan Analysis and Plan Drift Advisor, Workload History, Index Advisor, and Vacuum Advisor — demonstrated live, and how their findings become alerts in the console you already run. 35 minutes with live Q&A. Register and the recording and slides come to you either way.

Sep 23, 2026

Is This Query Still Running the Baseline Plan? Plan Analysis and the Plan Drift Advisor
Blog

Is This Query Still Running the Baseline Plan? Plan Analysis and the Plan Drift Advisor

When a query that was fine last week turns slow, the evidence you need is the plan it actually ran, and that plan is usually gone by the time anyone looks. Plan Analysis keeps it, captured by auto_explain during the query's own execution with nothing re-run, and checks it against five detection rules. The Plan Drift Advisor keeps each query's accepted baseline plans and tells you when a query leaves them. Part two of four on the advisory features in the PostgreSQL Plug-in for Oracle Enterprise Manager.

Sep 21, 2026

A VDDK-Independent Stack for Migrating VMware Workloads
Blog

A VDDK-Independent Stack for Migrating VMware Workloads

In late August 2026, every public download page for VMware's Virtual Disk Development Kit started returning a 404, with no deprecation notice and no replacement. Your backups are almost certainly fine, because the vendors who need VDDK bundle it inside their own installers. Your exit is what got harder, and VMware has now said in public that migrating to another platform is not a licensed use of the library. Here are four guest-level approaches that remove the dependency, the real trade-offs of each, and the four practices that decide whether any of them work.

Sep 11, 2026

Which Index Should You Actually Create? HypoPG, pg_qualstats, and the PostgreSQL Index Advisor
Blog

Which Index Should You Actually Create? HypoPG, pg_qualstats, and the PostgreSQL Index Advisor

Most index advice is a hunch with a table name attached: this table gets scanned a lot, so maybe index something on it. The Index Advisor in the August 2026 release of the PostgreSQL Plug-in for Oracle Enterprise Manager replaces the hunch with two kinds of evidence. HypoPG prices a candidate index by planning against it without building it, and pg_qualstats reports the predicates your workload actually ran that no index served. Part one of four on the release's advisory features: how each layer works, where each one stops, why they deliberately disagree, and what it takes to install them.

Sep 9, 2026

Now in Open Beta: MySQL, SQL Server, and Db2 Plug-ins for Oracle Enterprise Manager
Blog

Now in Open Beta: MySQL, SQL Server, and Db2 Plug-ins for Oracle Enterprise Manager

As of September 1, 2026, all three Integration Plumbers database plug-ins for Oracle Enterprise Manager are in Open Beta: MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and IBM Db2. Each one makes its engine a first-class target in the console you already run, collects with a read-only account over an encrypted connection, and ships thresholds and compliance rules that work on day one. Here's what each plug-in covers, what Open Beta means in practice, and the four steps to get a license key, install it against your own estate, and tell us what you find before general availability.

Sep 1, 2026

OpenTelemetry Doesn't Need More Heroes. It Needs an Institution.
Blog

OpenTelemetry Doesn't Need More Heroes. It Needs an Institution.

Mat Duggan's August 2026 spreadsheet found that 86% of merges in the OpenTelemetry C++ repository come from a single person, and that the PHP repository has merged 181 pull requests through exactly two people. That isn't a contributor shortage, it's a labor-model problem: the project is underwriting an institutional commitment with individual effort. Here are four fixes, each one already working in another open-source project: a pooled maintainer fund, real apprenticeships instead of contribution drives, support levels that describe capacity honestly, and maintainer-health reviews with a defined response.

Aug 28, 2026

Was That Query Always This Slow? The Query-History Gap in MySQL, SQL Server, and DB2
Blog

Was That Query Always This Slow? The Query-History Gap in MySQL, SQL Server, and DB2

Your database can tell you which queries are slow right now. It usually can't tell you which ones got slower, because the per-query numbers it keeps are a running total with no time axis: reset on restart, or evicted as a cache fills. Here's the query-history gap in MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and DB2, why SQL Server is the exception that proves the point, and why the trend belongs in the Oracle Enterprise Manager repository, including the unglamorous work of making the subtraction honest.

Aug 24, 2026

Logs Without the Regret, Part 2: Building the Alloy and Loki Pipeline
Blog

Logs Without the Regret, Part 2: Building the Alloy and Loki Pipeline

Part 1 made the case that log cost is set at write time by what you index. This is the hands-on half. A production-grade Alloy and Loki pipeline comes down to four decisions: what gets in, what gets rewritten, what gets indexed, and what happens when the backend is unavailable. Here's the three-component minimum that proves the transport works, the OTTL processors that filter and redact in flight, how to set label policy server-side in otlp_config, and the four signals worth alerting on once it is live.

Aug 19, 2026

Least-Privilege by Design: One Read-Only, TLS-First Way to Monitor DB2, SQL Server, and MySQL
Blog

Least-Privilege by Design: One Read-Only, TLS-First Way to Monitor DB2, SQL Server, and MySQL

Every database monitoring tool eventually meets the security team, and the answer is usually a broad-privilege account plus an agent installed on the database host. That's a design choice, not a law of nature. Here's the posture shared by all three Integration Plumbers plug-ins for Oracle Enterprise Manager: one read-only grant per engine, an encrypted connection that won't quietly downgrade, your choice of where collection runs, and why that same design reaches a managed cloud database without a rebuild.

Aug 13, 2026

Logs Without the Regret, Part 1: How Loki and Alloy Fit Into OpenTelemetry
Blog

Logs Without the Regret, Part 1: How Loki and Alloy Fit Into OpenTelemetry

Most log pipelines weren't chosen so much as inherited, and the bill nobody can fully explain traces back to a single decision: what you put in the index. Loki's native OTLP endpoint splits log data into a small set of indexed labels and unlimited structured metadata, and Grafana Alloy gives you a server-side place to decide which is which. Here's why traditional pipelines break on cardinality, what the native endpoint actually changes, and where the collector tier still earns its keep.

Aug 3, 2026

No Cliff, No Drama: Db2 11.5 to April 2027, 12.1 Open-Ended, and the New Ground Ahead
Blog

No Cliff, No Drama: Db2 11.5 to April 2027, 12.1 Open-Ended, and the New Ground Ahead

While MySQL and SQL Server admins spent this summer watching end-of-support dates pass, DB2's is still ahead: IBM supports Db2 LUW 11.5 until April 30, 2027, and hasn't published an end-of-support date for 12.1 at all. Here's why that runway makes now the right time to fix DB2 monitoring rather than scramble at it, the compliance rule that flags your 11.5 estate the day the date passes, what the DB2 Plug-in for Oracle Enterprise Manager closes that even IBM's free Data Management Console leaves open, and the ground on the roadmap in Db2 for z/OS and the 12.1 AI Query Optimizer.

Jul 29, 2026

Inside the OpenTelemetry GenAI SIG: The Conversations Shaping AI Observability
Blog

Inside the OpenTelemetry GenAI SIG: The Conversations Shaping AI Observability

The GenAI semantic conventions aren't handed down by a vendor. They're argued out in weekly public meetings and a Slack channel anyone can join, and the biggest open questions — evaluation, agentic systems, content privacy, and cost attribution — are the ones that decide whether your production telemetry is portable in three years. Here's where the debates are happening and how to walk in.

Jul 20, 2026

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