Issue 112
This issue is sponsored by:
LightStep is one of the new breed of tools out there I’m excited about. Designed with modern, high-scale, high-traffic architectures in mind, LightStep makes it easy to spot, diagnose, and solve performance issues. Check it out here.
Articles & News on monitoring.love
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.
Real World DevOps - Improving Your Vendor Relationships with Jeremy Tangren
Many people view the relationships they have with their vendors, whether SaaS or service companies, somewhere along a line between disdain and indifference. But it doesn’t need to be that way. In fact, vendors can be a crucial component of your team and help make your company’s vision a reality–provided you know how to work with your vendors. My guest this week is an expert on this very thing, and he’s joined me to talk through it all.
From The Community
2019 Monitorama Live Stream Day 1, Day 2, Day 3
Basic math says the vast majority of you didn’t make it to Monitorama PDX this year, but thankfully their livestream is incredible. The raw recordings are up on YouTube right now.
Detecting Interference: An A/B Test of A/B Tests
Not strictly monitoring, but some of the idea are interesting and have potential uses for us too. And, ultimately, it does result in a sort of monitoring test.
eBPF and XDP for Processing Packets at Bare-metal Speed
I hadn’t heard of XDP before so this is pretty cool.
Grafana Labs at KubeCon: All the Highlights
All of the talks from the Grafana team at KubeCon this year on one page.
Logging at Box: More efficient and more cost effective!
tldr k8s, Kafka, ELK, and a bunch of glue
Observability Doesn’t Work in Dev
Always a pain in my arse: how do you treat systems in dev? Everywhere I’ve worked, we’ve ultimately ended up with separate tooling for dev just to have it not interfere with production–and that’s not exactly great.
Sustainable Operations in Complex Systems with Production Excellence
From the article: “But in practice, teams often wind up on call without proper training and safeguards for their well-being. Suddenly changing the responsibilities of a team worsens service reliability, demoralizes the team, and creates incentives to shirk responsibilities. … Tools can only help us automate existing workflows rather than teach new skills or adapt processes to solve current problems.”
Creating Custom Kibana Visualizations
A tutorial on creating Kibana visualizations with Vega instead of writing plugins.
A tale of SLOs at SoundCloud. Very useful stuff in here.
Demystifying Observability for Startups
This is a super great talk on observability from Cory Watson at SignalFx (formerly, head of observability at Stripe).
An update on Sunday’s service disruption (official)
Exactly what it sounds like, and not really that interesting, but the analyses from ThousandEyes and LightStep are pretty interesting.
This issue is sponsored by:
20 Patterns to Watch for in Engineering Teams
GitPrime’s new book draws together some of the most common software team dynamics, observed in working with hundreds of enterprise engineering organizations. Actionable insights to help you debug your development process with data. Get Your Copy.
Events
Did you miss Monitorama in PDX this week? Now’s your chance–grab a ticket to Monitorama Baltimore before they sell out. :D
See you next week!
– Mike (@mike_julian) Monitoring Weekly Editor