Issue 052
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
This issue is sponsored by:
Free Guide: Low-Risk Continuous Delivery
Adopting Continuous Delivery can bring a lot of benefits, but deploying to production can be filled with uncertainty. Learn how to reduce the risks with the right culture, architecture, and tooling to deploy early and often.
Check out this free guide as we explore solutions.
Monitoring News, Articles, and Blog posts
Synthetic Monitoring from the Cloud vs Backbone and Broadband Nodes
There’s a fair amount of sales pitch in this article, but it makes a really, really great point: synthetic performance test results made from infrastructure running on AWS (in other words, most synthetic website monitoring apps) to your AWS-hosted app is bound to be inaccurate. Possibly, by a lot.
There has been a trend lately of people cough_monitoring companies_cough jumping on this rising tide of “observability,” and suddenly changing their marketing from “We do monitoring!” to “We do observability!” All that would be great, if they actually did observability all along. Pretty much none of them did. This post lays out a vision for what is actually required to say you have an observability platform versus a monitoring platform.
Holt-Winters Forecasting Simplified
A visual introduction to Holt-Winters Forecasting, a model that can be rather helpful in determining the trend of a given time series and predicting its future values.
Moving Past Shallow Incident Data
Collecting incident length, time-to-detection, time-to-resolution, and calculating MTTD (Mean Time To Detection) and MTTR (Mean Time To Recovery) are helpful data to have… but they’re not helping you detect or resolve incidents any faster. For that, you need to dig deeper and think about the role that humans play in incidents.
SF Metrics - Baron Schwartz: Monitoring Is Not Observability (video)
Baron Schwartz, founder and CEO at VividCortext, gave a talk recently at SF Metrics on monitoring and observability, how they differ, and a whole bunch of other really great stuff.
Full disclosure: I’m an organizer for this meetup.
SF Metrics - Michael J. Freedman: PostgreSQL as Persistent Storage for Prometheus Metrics (video)
Michael J. Freedman, cofounder and CTO at TimescaleDB, also spoke at SF Metrics recently, on using Postgres as a backing database for metrics.
Full disclosure: I’m an organizer for this meetup.
Speaking of recent talks, the recordings from the recent GrafanaCon EU 2018 conference are live now. There’s some really great stuff in here. You folks know how much I love monitoring tools used for non-systems work, so it’s probably no surprise that one of my personal favorites is Bringing Observability to the Built Environment at City Scale, by my good friend @acedrew. He talks about using systems monitoring tools to monitor environmental metrics on a room-by-room basis for the City of Washington, D.C. government.
See you next week!
– Mike (@mike_julian) Monitoring Weekly Editor