Issue 141
Running a few hours late this week, but I think it will be worth the wait. Some fun and interesting articles with an emphasis on Windows forensics and open source observabilty tooling. Enjoy! ☕🌞
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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.
From The Community
Golden Signals - Monitoring from first principles
An excellent summary of Google’s “Four Golden Signals” for SRE, including some examples that feel appropriate for this audience.
Monitoring and Forensics Tools on Windows
Before today, I’d never heard of the Sysinternals Suite for Windows. This looks like an impressively comprehensive collection of utilities for forensics and general monitoring capabilities on Windows systems. Very cool stuff.
P.S. Microsoft has a dedicated page for this toolset, along with links to the respective documentation pages for each utility.
Open Source for Better Observability
I’m a big believer that for any new technology (e.g. events) to become ubiquitous, there needs to be an open source alternative to provide competition and training opportunities. This article does a good job summarizing the most popular open source tools representing the pillars of observability.
Fine-tuning Observability — how do we constantly revisit & improve
Always a good idea to think more critically and audit how we’re using our observability systems in practice. Some helpful nuggets of experience buried in here.
Monitoring a Windows cluster with Prometheus
I wonder if I can use this to monitor how many hours I spend playing Rocket League each night? OTOH, some things are better left unknown.
Announcing the Donation of the OpenTelemetry eBPF Collector
As a fan of network observability, I’m hyped to see Splunk announce their open sourcing of Flowmill (acquired by Splunk last year)’s eBPF collector to the OpenTelemetry project. This could lead to some huge improvements in terms of service awareness on the network. Who else wants to see the old Boundaq brought back to life? ✋
OpenTelemetry C++ v1.0 — what’s there, and what next
The C++ client for OpenTelemetry has announced their v1.0 release. Great to see another OpenTelemetry project recognize their progress and general maturity.
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What makes a good postmortem? This article focuses on the basics and desired outcomes.
A look inside how the Prometheus Conformance Program works and why it’s important
I’m very excited to see that the Prometheus project has kicked off their Conformance Program, with compliance tests already merged. I don’t know that there are a lot of vendors out there with compatibility issues, but it’s always important to set expectations publicly.
Service Status Monitoring Using WhatsApp, Notion, and Python
This feels like what you’d get if you asked someone to design an alerting system as a Rube Goldberg machine using only SaaS products.
Seriously, I want to believe the author is trolling, but the dedication here to building this system out of hosted services is… impressive. Who knew you could build your “monitoring database” in Notion?? 😆
Monitor Apache Airflow metrics with Metricbeat, Logstash and Elasticsearch
A quick and easy example for capturing Airflow metrics with your ELK stack.
Tools
“The Sysinternals Troubleshooting Utilities have been rolled up into a single Suite of tools.”
Job Opportunities
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Senior Software Engineer, Observability at New York Times (NYC)
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See you next week!
– Jason (@obfuscurity) Monitoring Weekly Editor