Issue 078

This issue is sponsored by:

The amount of data (and infrastructure) you have to work with only keeps increasing – and you have to generate logs from all of it and synthesize them as much as possible.

This eBook will help you do just that: figure out what to log and how to log it. You’ll get step-by-step guides for logging in Java, C++, Python, C#, JS, Ruby, Go, Node.js, and Spring Boot.

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Latest Articles on monitoring.love

Observerless: The hottest new thing in monitoring you’re already doing

The (in)famous Corey Quinn of Last Week in AWS recently graced the website of Monitoring Weekly and wrote this gem on a new/old concept: Observerless. Now with video of this talk from ServerlessConf, available at A Cloud Guru.

From The Community

Grafana as a Yet Another Tool for Technical Monitoring of Software Products We Build

It’s always interesting to get peek into how other companies use tools. The folks at Logicify have gone into detail on how they use Grafana and the different use cases they have for it. I especially like the business intelligence use case.

Grafana’s Explore UI: Taking a Deeper Dive into Data with Prometheus Queries

This upcoming feature in Grafana looks amazing and I can’t wait to see it out of beta. In essence, this allows you to take a query that’s defined in a dashboard and explore deeper in an ad hoc way by changing the query–without losing the dashboard config. Only Prometheus is supported in the beta and I’m looking forward to seeing more datasources supported on this.

The Benefits of Using “Monitoring Gateways” Architecture for Large-Scale IT Environments

This talk from Waze proposes an interested monitoring pattern: for large-scale environments, deploy an abstraction layer between the application and the monitoring system to handle aggregation, querying, and other functionality. Kind of seems like a /health endpoint, except for multiple applications and not directly coupled with any of them.

Monitoring Social Signals to Reduce Alert Fatigue With SignalFx

What do you do when you’re the CTO and want to be aware of incidents, but also don’t need to be in the escalation path or alerted for every little thing–all without placing any burden/expectation on your team to tell you about incidents? This article talks about that exact challenge and how the CTO of SignalFx went about trying to solve it for themselves. The article uses SignalFx as the implementation example, but the principles should be easily adapted for whatever tools you’re using.

CNCF To Host Cortex in the Sandbox

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation continues its adoption of neat projects, with Cortex being the latest. Looks to be good news for both Cortex and Prometheus users. You can read more about what Cortex is here.

Why The Observability Pipeline Won’t Solve Everything

I linked to an article last week about a proposed Observability Pipeline. Go read that to get up to speed on the idea before coming back to this one, which suggests the biggest hurdle is going to be with vendor infrastructure integrations. The article also points out one other issue that needs more attention: by attempting to support multiple vendors in a generic manner, you must build your solution to the lowest common denominator, losing out on all vendor-specific features.

Introducing JMXQuery to Monitor Java via Python

I don’t know why, but JMX has always been a pain in the ass to me from a monitoring perspective. The folks at Outlyer wrote a Python module for use in their own agent but decided to make it more generic and release it for public use. It certainly does look like it’s way better than most JMX monitoring interfaces I’ve run into (I’m looking at you, collectd).

Events

MonitorSF - October 9, 2018 - San Francisco, CA USA

I’m giving a teaser of my upcoming DevOpsDays KC and OSMC talk at MonitorSF in a few weeks. If you’re in SF, come on out.

NewOps Days - October 10th, 2018 - San Jose, CA USA

Splunk is putting together a new event series that looks pretty neat, and it isn’t just a Splunk event in disguise. Best part: it’s free.

See you next week!

– Mike (@mike_julian) Monitoring Weekly Editor