Heya folks, a quick note from your friendly editor: starting with next week’s issue, Monitoring Weekly will be published on Friday mornings instead of Wednesday mornings. This helps me consistently get it out on time, on top of my new duties as CEO of The Duckbill Group. As always, thanks for being a loyal reader. <3

This issue is sponsored by:

SignalFx logoBest Practices for Monitoring Microservices on Kubernetes

Kubernetes has emerged as the de-facto standard for orchestrating containerized applications. While Kubernetes abstracts away many complexities, it also introduces new operational and monitoring challenges. Download this ebook to learn how to gain end-to-end visibility into infrastructure nodes, Kubernetes objects, and every microservice deployed.

Latest Articles on monitoring.love

The Vendor Is Not the Enemy with Cory Watson

I spoke with Cory Watson on Real World DevOps recently. Cory is previously the lead on Observability at both Twitter and Stripe, and now a Technical Director at SignalFx, and we had a fantastic chat about the transition from being a customer to being a vendor, as well as a whole bunch of monitoring stuff.

Observability & Monitoring Community Slack

Come hang out with all your fellow Monitoring Weekly readers. I mean, I’m also there, but I’m sure everyone else is way cooler.

From The Community

Accelerate: State of DevOps 2019 Survey

This survey is the real deal, and it needs your input. Designed and conducted by Nicole Forsgren, an actual researcher and not a marketer with an agenda to push, the results are legit. Your input is incredibly valuable to the survey, as it helps everyone in the world of Ops improve what we’re doing. You can see 2018’s results here, in case you’re curious what comes out of this.

Metrictank meta tags

I’ll be honest: I forgot Metrictank was a thing. For those with me, Metrictank is designed to be a scalable metrics2.0-based, multitenant timeseries database that’s a replacement for Graphite. Also, it’s entirely free and open source.

From events to Grafana annotation

This is a super neat tool for making Grafana annotations a lot easier to create.

Is Operational Sympathy A (Good) Thing?

I absolutely love this article for two big reasons: 1) I disagree with a few of the main points, and 2) the author is clearly way smarter than me. Highly recommended read.

NexClipper/NexClipper: NexClipper is a fast and simple Kubernetes Monitoring

“What gets measured gets managed” — it’s wrong and Drucker never said it

I’m one of those weirdos that has the entire bibliography of Peter Drucker on their bookshelf (I’m a riot at parties) and I’ve seriously been trying to find this quote for years because 1) everyone loves saying it in some effort to lend weight to the idea of “hey maybe me should measure and monitor stuff”, and 2) it’s always felt “off” to me. This article (and the accompanying citation from The Ducker Institute) are awesome, and goes into more detail on why the idea itself is a little misguided.

The Truth About Incident Management

Mythbusting a few pervasive ideas about incident management. My favorite: “Myth #4: Only customer-impacting incidents matter”

What is BGP Visibility, Really?

Networking and network monitoring holds a special place in my heart, and particularly the utter shitshow that underpins the internet: BGP. This article goes into BGP monitoring and the various approaches available, ending with a bit about how to vet any product that claims to do it.

Amazon CloudWatch Launches Search Expressions

It’s almost like the CloudWatch team woke up from their deep slumber, looked around, and thought, “Oh wait, we were supposed to be building a monitoring tool…guess we should get on it.”

Key Kafka Metrics to Monitor

Got some Kafka? Here, have some monitoring.

The CASE Method: Better Monitoring For Humans

Everyone loves a good framework and this is a super good one focused on alert design.

A Practitioner’s Guide to System Dashboard Design Part 1

Following up on the conversation Cory and I on Real World DevOps recently, here’s his article on the foundations of dashboard design for operations.

The Tyranny of the SLA

This is a talk from 2015 that only just recently got published and it’s fantastic. <3

Whats New in Zabbix 4.2

For the Zabbix folk among you, 4.2 is out with lots of goodies.

This issue is sponsored by:

SignalFx logoBest Practices for Monitoring Microservices on Kubernetes

Kubernetes has emerged as the de-facto standard for orchestrating containerized applications. While Kubernetes abstracts away many complexities, it also introduces new operational and monitoring challenges. Download this ebook to learn how to gain end-to-end visibility into infrastructure nodes, Kubernetes objects, and every microservice deployed.

Events

PagerDuty Summit 2019 - September 23-25, 2019 - San Francisco, CA USA

See you next week!

– Mike (@mike_julian) Monitoring Weekly Editor