Issue 124
Tons of great content this week, including an entire playlist of recorded content from SLOcon 2021. OMG and Brendan Gregg with eBPF! Be still my beating heart…
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.
From The Community
Getting started with Google Cloud Monitoring APIs
A handy guide for creating your own custom metrics for your applications in Google Cloud.
It’s a mouthful. It’s also a pretty darn useful approach to policy management if you’re using Kubernetes with Gatekeeper in an Enterprise environment.
USENIX LISA2021 BPF Internals (eBPF)
Brendan Gregg with a deep-dive on eBPF internals. If you’re like me, you’ll pause the video every 10 seconds to go look things up, but it’s totally worth it.
Infrastructure monitoring using kube-prometheus operator
Prometheus is a no-brainer for monitoring Kubernetes. The Prometheus Operator project takes it a step further, delivering a full suite of exporters, dashboards, and more for improved observability on your K8s clusters.
An Illustrated Enterprise Release Checklist For Applications
A handy checklist of considerations for deploying new releases. Although most of these tips have a strong correlation with proper monitoring techniques, they make a point of calling out the fact that monitoring is not a panacea for careful scrutiny of your release process.
Hybrid Multi-Cloud Monitoring through AWS Managed Services for Grafana
I honestly didn’t expect Amazon Managed Grafana (AMG) to include support for competing cloud services. Good to see this, though I’m still nervous about the potential for Amazon to “embrace, extend, and extinguish” our favorite open source dashboarding software.
First M8: An easier way to query Prometheus!
Anxious to see how this UI develops. Frankly, anything that makes PromQL query composition easier is a huge win in my book.
Perfect timing, I just finished the F1 series on Netflix and needed something else to binge-watch. ¡Vamos!
Moving our monitoring system from managed Datadog to self-managed Prometheus stack
Interesting story of (yet another) company making the decision to move their monitoring services off Datadog to an in-house stack. Is that a pang of regret I hear?
Exploring logging strategies with the Elastic Stack
I gotta be honest… I know lots of folks out there are heavy users of Elasticsearch and are mostly happy with it, but some of these considerations almost make me happy to be paying the Splunk tax. But if ELK is your jam, you should totally check out this article.
Grafana line colors that follow thresholds…
I don’t typically drop tweets in here, but this is a creative use of thresholds. Hopefully this will land in Grafana 8.1?
Building a Custom Prometheus Exporter in Python
Nice little example for creating your own exporter with Python.
Tools
prometheus-operator/kube-prometheus
“This repository collects Kubernetes manifests, Grafana dashboards, and Prometheus rules combined with documentation and scripts to provide easy to operate end-to-end Kubernetes cluster monitoring with Prometheus using the Prometheus Operator.”
“First M8 is an Electron-based application built to make querying Prometheus instances much more accessable and approachable to those new to Dev Ops or seasoned veterans who want a more intuitive interface when monitoring and scraping data.”
Events
Monitorama PDX 2021 - September 13-15 (Portland, OR)
One of the first technical conferences to resume in-person events, Monitorama is returning to Portland, OR this fall. It looks like a return to form for one of our favorite events (ok, we might be biased). Hope to see you there!
Job Opportunities
DevOps Engineer at GraphCMS (Berlin/Remote)
Sr Software Engineer / DevOps at Ameelio (NYC/Remote)
AWS DevOps Engineer at Elevation Solar (Austin/Remote)
Ready to lower your AWS bill? Now might be the perfect time for an AWS Cost Optimization project with The Duckbill Group. The Duckbill Group aims for a 15-20% cost reduction in identified savings opportunities through tweaks to your architecture–or your money back. (SPONSORED)
See you next week!
– Jason (@obfuscurity) Monitoring Weekly Editor