We have a veritable smorgasbord of Prometheus and logging stories this week. Props to the authors for a fun upcoming week of reading about our favorite monitoring and observability topics.

P.S. My heart goes out to the people of Ukraine. I hope this senseless war is brought to a swift and peaceful conclusion. đŸ‡ș🇩💙💛

This issue is sponsored by:

Timescale logo

Learn OpenTelemetry tracing with this lightweight microservices demo

The Promscale team has built a lightweight, easy-to-deploy microservices demo instrumented with OpenTelemetry so you can play around with tracing. The demo also includes 6 pre-built Grafana dashboards to monitor upstream and downstream dependencies, throughput, latency, and error rates. Check out this blogpost for a complete walkthrough!



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

OpenTelemetry democratises access to observability data & will enable massive innovation

We see a lot of articles about OpenTelemetry, but this might be the most concise and helpful one I’ve read yet. Bookmark this one and share it with your peers who need to learn about OpenTelemetry.

Transforming remote JSON into Prometheus metrics

Did you know you could consume data from remote JSON APIs into Prometheus? I can think of a number of different use cases for this. Nice example.

How secure is your Grafana instance? What you need to know

A fairly exhaustive look at Grafana’s security features. Just note that most of its advanced capabilities are locked away in their commercial offerings.

How to monitor Starlink with Prometheus

I consider myself fortunate to live in a rural area with fiber internet. If you’re one of the lucky folks with access to Starlink, here’s a quick tutorial for monitoring your connection with Prometheus.

Exploring logging strategies with the Elastic Stack

Considerations for indexing your Elastic Stack logging services. There’s some good stuff in here, but it also reminds me why I happily paid the “Splunk tax” at my last gig.

Scaling Kafka Consumer for Billions of Events

PayPal engineers share their techniques for benchmarking Kafka and testing different failure scenarios before their services went to production.

Saving on AWS Lambda Amazon CloudWatch Logs costs

A really clever way of buffering up debug logs in AWS Lambda to avoid blowing up your CloudWatch budget.

Self-managed Prometheus remote-write receiver for your K8S

Running Prometheus on the Kubernetes server you’re trying to monitor is easy but isn’t always the most effective use of cluster resources. This four-part series demonstrates how to send your K8s metrics to Prometheus’ remote write receiver with the Grafana Cloud agent, and more. This is a nice technique to have in your toolkit.

Cribl logo

Data’s growing at over 20% YoY, but most budgets are not.

Cribl is advocating for an open ecosystem for data with the introduction of an Observability Lake, an open, vendor-neutral place to cheaply store data in open formats. Add this to an observability pipeline to help route logs, metrics, and traces regardless of source, and you can avoid vendor lock-in and take control of all your observability data. Learn more about it from CEO Clint Sharp here. (SPONSORED)



Distributed Tracing in Microservices

A handy tutorial for anyone wanting to add distributed tracing with Zipkin and Spring Sleuth to their Java (Spring) application.

Terraform Logging

If you’re a Terraform user, take a few minutes to enjoy this quick overview of Terraform’s logging options and capabilities.

The Challenges of Modern Observability

An introduction to modern observability, with an emphasis on Kubernetes monitoring and availability.

Tools

johanhaleby/kubetail

“Bash script that enables you to aggregate (tail/follow) logs from multiple pods into one stream. This is the same as running ‘kubectl logs -f’ but for multiple pods.”

Events

Monitorama PDX 2022 - June 27-29 (Portland, OR)

Monitorama is returning to Portland, OR this summer. 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 II, Cloud Infrastructure at CareMessage (Remote)

Customer Reliability Engineer (K8s) at Replicated (Remote)

Site Reliability Engineer at Replicated (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