Issue 160
If you’re interested in distributed tracing, this is definitely the article for you. Also some fun posts around observability design patterns, a new load testing framework, and some hot vendor takes. 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
How to Handle Terabytes of Metrics in Kubernetes Monitoring
If you’ve ever been responsible for scaling an in-house monitoring service, this article should feel familiar. If you’re considering “upgrading” from Prometheus to Thanos, you should definitely check this out.
Introducing Ballast: An Adaptive Load Test Framework
Uber engineers have developed a new test framework for stress testing, capacity planning, debugging, and more. This looks legitimateley exciting and I hope they consider open sourcing it in the near future.
Microservices Observability Design Patterns
So often we get hung up on the tooling and their limitations without really thinking about the problems we’re trying to provide solutions for. I love this collection of design patterns for building observability into our (micro)services.
How to Get the Most Out of Go Distributed Tracing?
Speaking of design patterns, here’s one engineer’s recap on how they started to implement distributed tracing in their own Go-based services.
What is OpenTelemetry? A Straightforward Guide for Devs
A very thorough primer for getting started with distributed tracing and OpenTelemetry. Tons of useful information here, even if you’re already familiar with the broader topics.
Observability, Part 1: Intro & Postgres-Exporter
This author is starting a multi-part series covering a variety of different Prometheus exporters used at their company, starting with the PostgreSQL Server Exporter.
On the Brittleness of Dashboards
If I had a nickel for every time someone told me that dashboards are evil, or broken, or hazardous to your health… I’d still have fewer nickels than employers who’ve used dashboards effectively. Regardless, the author makes some valid points.
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)
An introduction to Amazon’s X-Ray service, including a demo project and use cases for tracing your own distributed systems on AWS.
A quick guide for using OpenTelemetry tracees with your Google Cloud Run applications.
Share the Responsibility: Against Automagical Solutions
Adopting a new library or exporter sounds straightforward, but there are always challenges when you’re talking about deploying it across ownership boundaries. This post raises some valid concerns and one possible “solution”.
HAProxy Monitoring Guide: Important Metrics & Best Tools
A breakdown of the most useful metrics to monitor for your production HAProxy services.
Tools
prometheus-community/postgres_exporter
“Prometheus exporter for PostgreSQL server metrics.”
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.
Job Opportunities
Software Engineer, Observability at The New York Times (Remote)
Staff Engineer, Observability at The New York Times (Remote)
Senior DevOps Engineer at Chartbeat (Remote)
Site Reliability Engineer, SRE & Build at Humio (US Remote)
Site Reliability Engineer, SRE & Build at Humio (EU Remote)
Sr. Site Reliability Engineer at Under Armour (US Remote)
Negotiating your AWS contract? Let us help. At The Duckbill Group, we’re on your side and we see dozens of these a year–more than most AWS account managers! We’ve helped negotiate everything from $3mm contracts to $650mm contracts and a whole slew in between. Check out our AWS contract negotiation services. (SPONSORED)
See you next week!
– Jason (@obfuscurity) Monitoring Weekly Editor