Issue 145
I hope you’re all doing well and hanging in there as we enter arguably the busiest time of the year for many (and quietest for everyone else). Lots of great content this week around Prometheus, alerting, and performance engineering. Oh, and an exciting new PubSub project from Pinterest. Enjoy! ❄⛄❄
This issue is sponsored by:
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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
Probing Endpoints with Blackbox-Exporter
How do you monitor endpoints on Kubernetes? This story demonstrates it with blackbox-exporter, while explaining the differences between using probes versus the Prometheus operator.
Take your alerts under control
I don’t think any single article can address the variety of cultural and systemic organizational issues that can lead to Really Bad Alerting Practices™. Nevertheless, this one does a solid job covering many of the aspects within our direct control and influence.
SRE? Understand vendor lock-in for your managed monitoring service
Considerations for choosing the right managed monitoring or observability solution (or not at all).
Scaling an Alerting Service Using AWS Lambda Functions
A very interesting (and unique) story about how Salesforce replaced their bottlenecked CheckMK alerting infrastructure with AWS components.
Observability Tips and Tricks For Using Grafana and Prometheus
Some excellent tips on how to leverage Prometheus labels more effectively in Grafana. Bonus points to the author for demonstrating the Prometheus labels API.
MemQ: An efficient, scalable cloud native PubSub system
Pinterest has announced MemQ, their new “low cost, cloud native” PubSub alternative to Kafka. It hasn’t been open sourced yet, but it supposed to be. This could be a huge win for teams moving a lot of data, particularly observability systems. Excited for this one.
Grafana 8.2.4 released with security fixes
Another CVE and security fix for a high-severity access control vulnerability in Grafana. Versions between 8.0.0 and 8.2.3 are affected and should be upgraded to 8.2.4 at the earliest opportunity.
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Increment has released another issue of their excellent digital magazine. And while this issue isn’t specifically about monitoring or observability, tech debt is a thing that affects all engineers. I strongly encourage you to read and share this fantastic article.
Top PostgreSQL monitoring metrics for Prometheus
Not to be outdone by the MySQL monitoring article in issue #143, this week brings us a look at the “top 10” PostgreSQL metrics you should be monitoring. Everyone loves a list.
The Five Pillars of Performance Engineering at Insider
A look at how Observability and related technology pillars join to form a giant robot for the sole purpose of protecting engineering performance at Business Insider. Seriously though, I’m glad they care about the user experience for folks who can access their paywall news sites.
Why we created a Prometheus Agent mode from the Grafana Agent
If you’re like me, Grafana Agent was probably one of those things that you used without realizing it. This story explains how Grafana Agent came into existence, and why the Prometheus folks have agreed to adopt this functionality natively in Prometheus.
Tools
https://github.com/prometheus-community/postgres_exporter
“Prometheus exporter for PostgreSQL server metrics.”
Job Opportunities
Data Warehouse/DevOps Engineer at AdvisorEngine (Remote)
Senior Platform Engineer at Replicated (Remote)
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See you next week!
– Jason (@obfuscurity) Monitoring Weekly Editor