Issue 074
This issue is sponsored by:
It is actually surprisingly difficult to create product testing criteria from scratch. Anyone who has evaluated products in the past can tell stories about new criteria popping up last minute, simply because no one thought about it before they found a problem in one product.
That’s a dumb way to evaluate products. Do better with Scalyr’s guide to evaluating a log management platform.
Articles & News
Now available: The open source guide to DevOps monitoring tools
Dan Barker, one of the writers for OpenSource.com and organizer of DevOpsDays Kansas City and the DevOps Kansas City meetup, just released a fantastic guide to open source monitoring and observability tools. Highly recommend downloading the full guide.
Sensu: Workflow Automation for Monitoring
I had the pleasure of attending Sensu Summit 2018 last week in Portland, OR, and had a fantastic time. One of my favorite bits from the conference (aside from all the fantastic speakers) was a talk from Caleb Hailey, CEO of Sensu, on how incredibly difficult it has always been to adequately describe Sensu. It’s sort of a monitoring tool, but that’s really just the beginning of its capabilities. They’ve finally come to a great way to describe: workflow automation for monitoring. Tying that together from speakers, I noticed that none of them were claiming “We deployed Sensu and it solved our problems,” but rather “We deployed Sensu and it allowed us to solve a bunch of other problems”.
Benchmarking PHP Logging Frameworks: Which is Fastest and Most Reliable
My vote’s for Monolog, simply because the other options are kind of a pain in the ass and Monolog is totally awesome. Well, as awesome as a PHP library can be anyways.
Auth0 Architecture: Running In Multiple Cloud Providers And Regions
They talk about their monitoring setup near the end of the article, which includes Cloudwatch, Datadog, Pingdom, and a new-to-me tool, SENTINL.
Custom Logging Levels using Log4j 1.2
I can’t help but wonder if the particular problem the author was solving for could have been handled simply by giving more resources to the app servers and/or log infrastructure, but regardless, this is a useful tip for sure.
Going Old-School with Wavefront (or How I FaaS-ed my way to a JSON Endpoint)
Linked just for the coolness of using a split-flap display in the office. I love the sound that several dozen of them make in European train stations, and they super look cool too. The author integrated one with Lambda, API Gateway, and Wavefront, but you should be able to make it work with something other than Wavefront with minimal changes.
Every once in a while, an article pops up that seems to predict the future. I really like this future: Based on this analysis, it should be possible, in theory, to develop an über-system. The write path could accept raw events, de-mux them into metrics, traces, and logs heuristically or by the “shape” of the data, make the relevant optimizations, and store them into purpose-driven backends. The read path could provide a single pane-of-glass-style interface abstracting over those backends.
Monitoring Raspberry Pi’s with Sensu and Monitoring My Kegerator With Sensu
One of the speakers at Sensu Summit, Aaron Sachs, gave a talk about monitoring their homebrewing kegerator with Sensu and it’s all awesome.
Events
London Metrics and Monitoring - September 20, 2018 - London, UK
See you next week!
– Mike (@mike_julian) Monitoring Weekly Editor