Issue 068
This issue is sponsored by:
Datadog is a SaaS monitoring platform for cloud-scale infrastructure and applications. Start a 14-day trial to get a free Datadog T-shirt, and test out the latest features, including Watchdog, which auto-detects performance anomalies, and Live Tail, a new way to explore your logs in real time.
Articles & News
Get Started Quickly With …
I somehow missed this quickstart article series on logging. What I love about the series is the practical, “just enough to get going” approach of the series. It’s certainly not a deep dive into the nuances of any particular language’s logging subsystem, but then again, most people don’t need that anyways. I’m really looking forward to more of them.
PHP Monolog Tutorial: A Step by Step Guide
Speaking of logging, PHP’s monolog isn’t bad at all. I actually went down a rabbit hole on this and realized PHP is used by a staggering number of websites. Welp.
Benchmarked Serverless observability tools, got very disappointed
The author did something that’s seemingly obvious, but few people actually do: they came up with three specific test cases and then pitted multiple tools against each other on the same test cases. Notably, not a single tool passed all three test cases.
How to Build Observable Distributed Systems
I somehow missed this great talk from QCon London back in March about distributed systems observability. There’s some great tips in here about health checks and instrumentation best practices.
The Present and Future of Serverless Observability
Also another QCon London talk, this one about serverless observability.
| **[O11ycast | Ep. #2, Observable DevOps with Christina Noren of CloudBees](https://www.heavybit.com/library/podcasts/o11ycast/ep-2-observable-devops-with-christina-noren-of-cloudbees/)** |
Episode 2 of O11ycast is out. Definitely worth a listen.
I’ve been recording some videos about SLOs myself this week, so this article was timely. One good bit in this article is an explanation of how to set your SLOs using a combination of transaction volume and “time quantum.”
Tools
One of the annoying things about monitoring is that it’s actually kinda hard to do at small scale. When you’ve got 100+ nodes, it makes sense to deploy a robust monitoring infrastructure, but that’d be dumb when you have one or two servers (such as a personal VPS). And yet, there’s not a lot of good tools for monitoring that few systems well. This seems to be a solution to that problem area.
Rally 1.0.0 Released: Start Benchmarking your Elasticsearch Clusters
I mentioned Rally in a previous issue some time ago, but it’s worth mentioning again now that it’s hit 1.0. Should be very handy in benchmarking and tuning your Elasticsearch clusters.
Events
Monitorama AMS 2018 - September 4-5, 2018 - Amsterdam, Netherlands
Are in Europe? Everyone’s favorite monitoring conference, Monitorama, is coming to a canal near you! Monitorama kindly sent over a discount code for Monitoring Weekly readers: use MLOVEWEEKLY at checkout for €100 off.
Go and GraphQL + Distributed Tracing + Views on Vgo - July 18, 2018 - San Francisco, CA USA
If you’re in San Francisco and looking for something to do tonight, why not stop by the GolangSF meetup? The tracing/observability talk looks like it’s gonna be a good one: Emmanuel Odeke from Orijtech will talk about distributed tracing and monitoring with OpenCensus. … It is the open source rewrite of the observability systems that have powered Google’s systems for the past 10 years.
Sensu Summit 2018 - August 22-23, 2018 - Portland, OR USA
Sensu has graciously offered a discount code for all Monitoring Weekly readers! Use MonitoringWeekly at checkout for $50 off the early bird ticket.
See you next week!
– Mike (@mike_julian) Monitoring Weekly Editor