Issue 159
Some excellent guides and demos this week, with an emphasis on tracing, logging, and tools. Enjoy! ☕📰😍
71% of organizations feel that their observability data is growing at a concerning rate.
Chronosphere is the only observability platform that puts you back in control by taming rampant data growth and cloud-native complexity, delivering increased business confidence. Find out the top observability concerns in 2022 in this EGS study.
Articles & News on monitoring.love
Observability & Monitoring Community Slack
It’s been amazing to see the community continue to grow. We’d love to have you join us and share what you’ve been working on.
From The Community
Learn OpenTelemetry tracing with this lightweight microservices demo
The folks at Timescale have put together a demo project for learning how to use OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, and related tools. The documentation looks very thorough and designed to help you get familiar with not just the setup, but how to query the system effectively.
Jaeger Tracing: A Friendly Guide for Beginners
After working the previous demo, jump into this article for a deeper (but still very beginner-friendly) look at Jaeger and tracing. There are some really good pointers and references peppered throughout this post.
How to monitor a Linux server using Prometheus & Grafana?
A quick primer on setting up Prometheus, Node Exporter, and Grafana to monitor your Linux systems.
Cron Monitoring — exploring Open Source Softwares
I’ll be honest, monitoring of cron jobs feels pretty low on my list of things to watch out for. Regardless, the folks at Trell have introduced me to a new OSS project I probably wouldn’t have heard of otherwise.
Event Pipelines (Part 2): Observing and Optimising
A fascinating look at how Zendesk engineers monitor and profile backpressure, using these sensors to optimize the performance of their stream processing pipeline. Check out Part 1 for some background on how they think about backpressure and buffering.
How to Manage Log Files Using Logrotate
An extensive guide on using logrotate for log management and maintenance.
How summary metrics work in Prometheus
A behind-the-scenes look at how Prometheus uses the CKMS algorithm to calculate summary metrics. This is not something you necessarily need to understand, but it can help to avoid some of the subtle pitfalls with this particular sampling type.
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 Polyglot Microservices
Another tracing demo this week, this one is intended for Java developers working with microservices in a polyglot stack.
Imbalance detection for healthier experimentation
If you do any work with A/B testing (or support teams that do), I strongly encourage you to check out this article from Etsy on the use of permutation testing to detect imbalances in the distribution of segments. Fascinating stuff.
OpenTelemetry (OTel) Is Key to Avoiding Vendor Lock-in
A strong case for avoiding vendor lock-in through adoption of OpenTelemetry. After years of dealing with vendor-specific agents and collectors, I couldn’t agree more.
Events
Call for Participation - Monitorama PDX 2022
Monitorama is returning to Portland, OR this summer. The organizers have recently opened up their CFP for a limited number of speaking slots. Deadline for submissions is March 31, 2022.
Tools
“Datadog monitors/dashboards/slos as code, avoid chaotic management via UI”
“Healthchecks is a cron job monitoring service. It listens for HTTP requests and email messages (“pings”) from your cron jobs and scheduled tasks (“checks”). When a ping does not arrive on time, Healthchecks sends out alerts.”
timbertson/backpressure-sensor
“Measure backpressure in reactive streams pipelines”
“snorql a.k.a. SQL-Monitoring is an open-source, free-to-use project developed at Udaan, aimed at diagnosing & resolving common database-related problems using SQL metrics.”
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