Issue 115
This issue is sponsored by:
20 Patterns to Watch for in Engineering Teams
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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.
Observability & Robots with Ian Sherman
I linked to their article on robots and observability in here a while back and I had the opportunity to interview Ian Sherman, their Head of Engineering, about what they’re up to and how it all works. I love the unique application of standard observability tooling to their space.
From The Community
Distributed Tracing — we’ve been doing it wrong
A bit of a teaser: “Tracing might still remain something that, once deployed, doesn’t unlock enough value to be of any practical use in the most commonly used debugging scenarios.” 100% agreed – last time I suggested to a vendor that tracing wasn’t terribly valuable, I ended up in an hour long debate. Glad I’m not the only one.
Logs vs. metrics: a false dichotomy
From the article: “This post is about how “logs vs. metrics” is a false dichotomy, and how thinking in this binary prevents us from seeing simpler ways to monitor our systems.”
How we implemented RED and USE metrics for monitoring
The folks at THRON discuss their monitoring and current stack. There’s some good stuff in here about instrumentation frameworks (RED, USE, Golden Signals).
Nobody wants to be woken up at 4 am
The folks at Farfetch discuss their monitoring journey and current stack too. TL;DR: Grafana, Thanos, Prometheus, Alertmanager,
The Three True-North Metrics that Your Product and Business Need
“Imagine finding yourself in an elevator with your CEO or top investor. After a brief hello she lands the big question on you: “How is the product doing?” You have 30 seconds to answer. A simple “all good” won’t cut it — you need numbers.” I have definitely been there and it’s amazing how many people who spend all day working on the product don’t have a clear answer about how it’s doing at a business-level. Perhaps you should make sure you’ve got one.
“if your application has a lot of logging methods, which don’t lead to physical IO operation, you may allocate a lot of unnecessary objects in the heap. And your application works slow, because of this.””
Analyze CloudWatch Logs like a pro
A great primer on the new-ish AWS service, CloudWatch Logs Insights.
Retaining Logs For A Year: Boring or Useful?
Primarily looking at this from a security angle, I’ll go ahead and ruin the conclusion for you because I’m feeling a bit sassy today: “1 year log retention is both a boring compliance requirement and a key resource for detecting top-tier threats.”
Distributed Tracing with Jaeger and the ELK Stack
A pretty straightforward walkthrough of Jaeger and ELK. Pretty much what it says on the box.
5 Traffic Website Metrics You Should Be Tracking
A bit of an article from the marketing side of the house. Some food for thought: what can you do on the application or infrastructure side to make these metrics even more useful for Marketing and Product?
What is the “cost” of doing instrumentation?
A fantastic set of independent performance benchmarks of OpenTracing libraries.
On a Deep Journey Towards Five Nines
Monitoring, alerting, time series forecasting, and more by the folks at PayPal. I particularly like their use of Jupyter notebooks.
This issue is sponsored by:
With flat pricing across all global regions for compute, object storage, and databases - plus a free managed Kubernetes service - DigitalOcean makes it easy to scale up your infrastructure without guessing what your cloud bill will be every month. Plus their documentation and tutorials are some of the best in the industry, so there’s no need to go to cloud school to use their services. Thanks again to DigitalOcean for their ongoing support. Check ‘em out here.
See you next week!
– Mike (@mike_julian) Monitoring Weekly Editor