Issue 113
Apologies for the late issue, folks. I’m technically on vacation in the UK this week and next and it’s been tricky finding reliable wifi in the countryside.
This issue is sponsored by:
Serverless has grown in popularity with application developers because it abstracts away the pesky operations pieces of development. Download SignalFx’s Definitive Guide to Serverless Monitoring and Observability and learn from dozens of SignalFx customers using serverless in production.
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.
| **[City-Scale Observability with Andrew Rodgers | Real World DevOps](https://www.realworlddevops.com/episodes/city-scale-observability-with-andrew-rodgers)** |
One of the most interesting conversations I’ve had was the day I learned about Andrew Rodgers using Graphite to monitor a million-dollar furnace in a manufacturing plant. Since then, he’s gone on to start a company that uses the same observability tooling you know and love (Influx, Kafka, Cassanda, Grafana, etc) to solve observability challenges in the physical world, such as tracking energy consumption in the hundreds of government buildings in Washington, D.C. If you’re at all interested in unique uses of software tooling, this episode is a fun one.
From The Community
How to monitor Golden signals in Kubernetes
Because everyone can generally do with a refresher course on the Golden Signals from time to time.
Chernobyl DevOps: Software Engineering, Disaster Management, and Observability
Following on the heels of Netflix’s latest documentary on Chernobyl, the author of this article relates the incident to software engineering. Also, lots of really interesting stuff about the incident that I didn’t know.
Monitorama Videos (individual sessions) are now up!
Wooo! And if you’re not sure where to start, Pete Cheslock from CHAOSSEARCH wrote up a good recap.
Monitoring at HelloFresh Part 1: Architecture
They’ve got an interesting monitoring architecture built on k8s, Prometheus, Thanos, and Grafana.
How to get near-realtime logs for a Terraform-managed Lambda function
Because reading Lambda logs from Cloudwatch Logs is a huge PITA, here’s a shell script that puts them into your console. Think of it like tail for Lambda.
CodeRecipe-dev/Heroku-log-AWS-cloudwatch
From the site: “Heroku doesn’t provide a native way of storing and retreiving old logs. Moreover, it doesn’t provide any sort of monitoring or analyzing on the logs. This standalone app uses API Gateway and AWS Lambda to stream logs into CloudWatch in real time. After the logs are in CloudWatch, they can be further queried and analyzed by third party providers.”
I didn’t even know this was a thing: if you’re Dockerizing Telegraf, you can build your own installation with only the plugins you require and cut down on the image size significantly.
How Not to Fail at Visualization
These are really great examples of good and bad visualizations with Grafana. Highly recommend you read this and take notes.
The Boring Stuff — Flask Logging
Flask is well-known for being the lightweight Python web framework, but that often has a negative in that you end up having to roll your own boilerplate quite often. The folks at Tenable just released some of their modules for Python+Flask logging boilerplate.
Threat detection metrics: exploring the true-positive spectrum
More interesting than the title sounds, the article makes a great case for how incident detection and alerting can be more complex than they first seem.
Hands-On Infrastructure Monitoring with Prometheus
A new book on Prometheus is out and available for purchase.
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.
Events
LogicMonitor LevelUp - June 24-26 - Austin, TX USA
I’m one of their invited speakers, so come on out. I’ll be talking about the business value of monitoring and observability.
See you next week!
– Mike (@mike_julian) Monitoring Weekly Editor