Issue 015
Hey folks, welcome to another installment of Monitoring Weekly! Did you write something about monitoring recently? Maybe got an idea rolling around in your head? Send it on over and let the community learn from you. :D
Monitoring News, Articles, and Blog posts
Site Speed Monitoring in A/B Testing and Feature Ramp-up
Web page performance has a direct correlation with many metrics we all care about: revenue, engagement, user retention, conversions, etc, yet so few companies invest much time or energy into optimizing it for the long haul. Not only is LinkedIn actively doing something about it, they’re doing it for every feature that gets shipped. Super awesome. This article goes in depth about how they’re doing it, use cases, and architecture of the underlying service.
Welcome Opbeat to the Elastic Family
In an industry-wide pattern of monitoring companies converging on the same product strategy, Elastic has acquired Opbeat, an APM product. Should be fun to see how they integrate it into the Elastic Stack.
Exponential Smoothing for Time Series Forecasting
The usual statistical forecasting models don’t work very well on operational data, but don’t fret: there are still options for forecasting. The author walks us through exponential smoothing approaches, including Holt-Winters (which has been available in Graphite for some time now). If you’ve ever wondered how the smoothing algorithms actually work, this is a great article for you.
timeShift(GrafanaBuzz, 1w) Issue 1
Our friends over at Grafana Labs have started a weekly roundup of Grafana-specific articles. It’ll be pretty cool if this encourages more of you Grafana users to write about what you’re doing (“ahem”, hint-hint, subtle cough…)
What the heck is time-series data (and why do I need a time-series database)?
Foundational skills and knowledge are, in my opinion, what sets great engineers apart from good engineers. The folks at TimescaleDB give us all a great foundational walkthrough of what time series data is and how it’s different from other data. Even for someone well-versed in the monitoring world, it’s worth a read.
Tools
Cachet: The Open Source Status Page System
A self-hosted, PHP-based StatusPage.io clone.
Pulling from the article above on time series data, this is the first I’ve seen of TimescaleDB, a time series database built on top of PostgreSQL.
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.
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– Mike (@mike_julian) Monitoring Weekly editor