Issue 022
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
Optimizing video playback performance
Niche-specific and problem-specific monitoring is always really fun because there’s always some peculiarity or constraint that most people won’t ever have to do with, simply by virtue of not having any exposure to the domain. Video stream monitoring is one of those that comes to mind, since so many of us just take it granted that it works. Of course, anyone who has worked on it can attest that it’s by no means simple or straightforward. This article pulls back the curtain a bit to show us what monitoring a stream looks like.
Early release edition: Practical Monitoring from O’Reilly
Utterly shameless plug, I know: my own book, Practical Monitoring, had the Early Release edition come out on Safari Books Online over the weekend. About half the chapters are available online. Let me know what you think and send some feedback, positive or negative. :)
Full disclosure: Yes, that’s my book. Yes, I’m self-promoting. Yes, that’s a monitor lizard on the cover. :D
From Monolith to Microservice Architecture on Kubernetes, part 4
This is a really surprisingly in-depth article on the author’s experience with implementing monitoring in their new Kubernetes-based infrastructure. They cover everything from metrics to tracing, and even how to write the readiness/liveness checks.
I’ve never found a good way to monitor serverless/FaaS effectively. Even on AWS, Lambda’s Cloudwatch/Cloudwatch Logs story is kinda…crap. I don’t normally link you folks to commercial solutions, but Dashbird is unique in that it’s solving a problem no one else is working on, and it looks really promising too.
Free O’Reilly Media Report - Post Incident Reviews
Yeah, there’s an opt-in wall, but this new ebook from Jason Hand at VictorOps is really good. I’ve already taken a ton of notes and I’m only a dozen or so pages in. Very much recommended.
Sensu Summit - The Future of Sensu (slidedeck)
Sensu Summit is currently going on today in Portland, OR and there’s some pretty cool stuff coming out Real Soon Now™. My favorite is the new architecture of Sensu 2.0, which is all written in Go instead of Ruby and solves some of the more painful parts of the Sensu architecture.
Full disclosure: My company is a Sensu Partner. I receive no consideration, financial or otherwise, from linking this article.
I highlighted the author’s previous post on Splunk tips a while back, and now they’re back with another installment: this time about setting up alerts in Splunk.
I’m not completely sold on anomaly detection being the solution for the example problem, but it does bring up some really interesting financial and ethical questions. When was the last time monitoring made you think about ethics, eh?
GoogleChrome/lighthouse: Auditing, performance metrics, and best practices for Progressive Web Apps
Lighthouse generates reports on best practices and performance metrics for a website similar to WebpageTest, but better. It has apparently been integrated into Google Chrome for a while but I’ve never paid any attention to it (though it also can be used without Google Chrome). Looks like it could be pretty easy to automate as part of a CI run and spit out results.
About your friendly editor
I’m Mike Julian, a monitoring/observability consultant and author of the upcoming O’Reilly book, Practical Monitoring. I help companies improve their application and infrastructure monitoring. Interested in working together? You can find me at AsterLabs.io.
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– Mike (@mike_julian) Monitoring Weekly editor