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
Why Should I Use a Time Series Database?

This is a much better explanation of why SQL databases are a poor choice for time series data than I’ve been able to give. It’s not like I’m some monitoring expert or anything, right? Very nice.

Prometheus: Apdex alerting

Everyone loves a good statistical index. I had almost forgotten about Apdex until I saw this article, which as it turns out, is also the most interesting and complex thing I’ve seen done with Prometheus. I’d really love to see more of this beyond this proof-of-concept. Anyone doing anything similar? I’d love to hear from you!

Observability and Monitoring Best Practices

The author does a really great job at writing an explainer article covering monitoring, observability, and a whole bunch of related things. Also, I and Monitoring Weekly are mentioned, which was a really nice surprise for my ego. (but the article is totally worth reading)

Monitoring On-Demand Kubernetes Clusters with Prometheus

The folks at GiantSwarm have created a custom service discovery controller for Prometheus to solve their issue of easily monitoring tons of Kubernetes clusters.

Grafana v5.0 Released

I’ve been anxiously awaiting this day: Grafana 5.0 is now stable and released. There are so many new (and very welcome) features, that I’m not sure I can list them all here. I think my favorite is datasources and dashboards being configurable from config files now. Suffice it to say, you should check out this release–it looks like it’s a very worthwhile upgrade. Congratulations to the Grafana team!

Talks/runbook.md at master · CaitieM20/Talks

Hat-tip to SRE Weekly for reminding me of this: a very nice example runbook as mentioned in a great talk at Monitorama PDX 2016, Tackling Alert Fatigue by Caitie McCaffrey.

See you next week!

– Mike (@mike_julian) Monitoring Weekly Editor