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Monitoring News, Articles, and Blog posts
Your Dashboard Needs a Waffle Chart

Oh how I loathe pie charts. Pie charts have a special place in hell, in my opinion. As a visualization, they’re meh at best, utterly atrocious at worst, and there’s nearly always an alternative visualization that better conveys the information anyways. This article talks about one of the alternatives, amusingly named a “waffle chart”.

Going open-source in monitoring, part II: Creating the first dashboard in Grafana

The third installment in a series I’ve covered in past issues. The examples are great, but I really love the whole guiding purpose behind how the author is building Grafana dashboards: replace New Relic. For teams steeped in New Relic, this could make it easier to switch to Grafana.

Elasticsearch 5.4.2 and Kibana 5.4.2 released

Minor bugfixes, but hey, bugs are worth upgrading over too.

State Drift Detection using Terraform

Score one for “clever uses of tools built for other purposes.” The short version is: what if you ran ‘terraform plan’ on a schedule? As it turns out, pretty useful stuff.

What can developers learn from being on call?

Like every great blog post, it started with a thread on Twitter that just grew…and grew…and grew. The post is a kinda-loose expounding-upon from the thread about how on-call makes you a better engineer. On the other hand, reading through it made me realize I haven’t been on-call in nearly two and a half years. Maybe that makes me just an alright engineer but my sleep habits are great. So, you know, pros and cons.

Events
SF Metrics Meetup - June 17th, 2017

Are you in San Francisco? Come hang out with fellow monitoring lovers at next week’s SF Metrics meetup. Not in San Francisco or just can’t make it? We’ve got you covered: there’s a free livestream too.

(full disclosure: I co-organize this meetup)

About your friendly editor

I’m Mike Julian, a monitoring/observability consultant and trainer. I help companies improve their application and infrastructure monitoring. You can find me at AsterLabs.io.

Do you enjoy Monitoring Weekly?

If you like what you’ve seen, here’s the link to invite your friends and colleagues! As always, if you have interesting articles, news, events, or tools to share, send them my way by emailing me (just reply to this email).

See you next week!

– Mike (@mike_julian) Monitoring Weekly editor