Issue 020
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
Monitoring Queue Sizes
If you were fortunate enough to be at Monitorama 2016, you might have seen Heinrich Hartmann’s great talk on Statistics For Engineers. He’s just turned his attention to understanding the math behind the well-known metric from iostat, average queue length. It’s worth a read, even if it’s just to remind you that you probably should have paid more attention in math class (yeah, I’m guilty too…).
mvantellingen/django-aws-xray: Unofficial Django app for AWS X-Ray
Maybe I’ve been living under a rock, but this is the first time I’ve seen anyone actually using AWS X-Ray (AWS’s tracing service). This Django app automatically adds X-Ray tracing support to your Django application, which is really neat. As an aside, if anyone has experiences with using X-Ray, you should write about it and send it my way!
robcowart/elastiflow: Netflow Monitoring with Elastic Stack
This came out a few weeks ago, but I somehow missed it and it’s definitely worth mentioning: send your NetFlow data to ELK. Much better than writing six figure checks to some NetFlow vendor that doesn’t play nicely with your other tools.
BinaryAlert: Real-time Serverless Malware Detection
The folks at Airbnb have open-sourced a tool (maybe I should say “platform”?) to detect malware in your environment. It’s all AWS-based but will analyze any file uploaded to S3, so you should be able to use it even if your primary infrastructure is on baremetal. It’s a pretty complex setup but looks really promising and useful!
Logstash Lines: Introducing a benchmarking tool for Logstash
With the launch of the monitoring API in Logstash some weeks back, there is now an official benchmarking tool to push Logstash to its limits and report back the metrics via the built-in monitoring API.
Datadog is putting on their own community-oriented event. No word on who’s speaking or whether there’s a livestream, but it’s free, and bonus points for being somewhere besides San Francisco!
August ‘17 SF Metrics Meetup - San Francisco Metrics Meetup
The SF Metrics Meetup is meeting next week to hear about what it’s like moving your logs from ELK to a SaaS solution and how Yelp manages and automates a bunch of dashboards on TVs all around their office. Can’t make it/not in San Francisco? No sweat–there’s a livestream!
Disclosure: I’m a co-organizer of the SF Metrics 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