Issue 149
Who else is ready for some holiday downtime? I hope you’re all doing well and able to spend time with your friends, families, and loved ones. Only a couple weeks left for 2021… for now, please enjoy this collection of articles from this past week. ⛄
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Is the new AWS RUM tool an industry game-changer? Let's find out.
Real User Monitoring for Amazon CloudWatch was recently announced at AWS re:Invent 2021, adding to their existing suite of over 200 products and services. But how does it stack up? Today, we’re going to try it out so you don't have to. Join us for a first look at AWS Real User Monitoring.
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
The Kubernetes Metrics and Monitoring Architecture
A solid primer for understanding which metrics are available in Kubernetes, and which services provide them.
SLICK: Adopting SLOs for improved reliability
Facebook wrote their own dedicated SLO store with integrations for their observability systems. It doesn’t look like SLICK has been open sourced, but it’s still a good overview of the challenges designing and scaling an SLO service across a company the size of Facebook.
Exploiting and Mitigating CVE-2021-44228: Log4j Remote Code Execution (RCE)
I know we’re all probably exhausted reading about the recent Log4j vulnerabilities, but this is an excellent write-up providing background, detailing the exploit, and providing steps on how to mitigate it.
Uptime Kuma — Open Source Uptime Monitoring
This is the first I’ve heard of “Uptime Kuma”, an open source and self-hosted alternative to Pingdom. It includes a Prometheus exporter too, so you could gather all of your health checks into a single central system.
End-to-End Prometheus Alerting Example with Replicated
Ok, I’m a little biased (I work at Replicated), but I was pretty excited to see this post demonstrating how to use kURL, KOTS, and Prometheus to monitor remote air-gapped or on-prem Kubernetes deployments.
Just-in-Time Nomad: Running the OpenTelemetry Collector on Hashicorp Nomad with HashiQube
Tired of Kubernetes getting all the OpenTelemetry coverage? Here’s a very thorough example for setting up the OTel Collector for Hashicorp Nomad with a variety of different Observability services.
How to View & Analyze Apache Access & Error Log Files
An approachable look at the Apache HTTP Server’s log formats. Not quite as exhaustive as the official docs, but a good starting point for anyone new to Apache administration.
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Monitoring Log4J scans in the wild using Minecraft Honeypot
I promise this will be the last Log4j related article (maybe), but I love the idea of a honeypot for tracking exploit traffic. Someone please track this in Prometheus and report back with your findings. 🙏
Observability mapping. Fun with prometheus, k8s and nginx!
If you’re hosting a bunch of Observability services behind the same subdomain, you might run into some rewrite rule obstacles. Here’s a pattern which the author is using for numerous namespace environments.
Starting an SRE Team? Stay Away From Uptime
Although this story isn’t really about monitoring signals, it drives home a point near and dear to my heart – the work we do is only as successful as the customers it enables. Talk and collaborate with your customers to understand which signals are important to them.
Somehow I was completely oblivious to GitLab’s “DevOps Platform” initiative. This seems to explain their recent acquisition of Opstrace’s open source observability platform.
Tools
“Uptime Kuma is an open source monitoring tool that can be used to monitor the service uptime along with few other stats like Ping Status, Avg. Response time, uptime etc.”
Job Opportunities
Infrastructure Engineer at Docker (Remote)
Site Reliability Engineer at StackPath (Remote)
Information Security Officer at Nobl9 (US Remote)
Sr. DevOps Engineer at iFit (US Remote)
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See you next week!
– Jason (@obfuscurity) Monitoring Weekly Editor