Issue 177
Hope you’re all staying safe in this near-global heat wave. Why not grab a cool drink and stay indoors with this week’s newsletter? Plenty of great articles covering monitoring tools and software this week, including some interesting stories from Netflix, Uber, and Intercom. 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
The Mathematics Behind Monitoring
We don’t talk nearly as much about the math of our metrics as we did in years past. Here’s a brief introduction to some of the more important metric types found in Prometheus, and when to use each.
Formulating ‘Out of Memory Kill’ Prediction on the Netflix App as a Machine Learning Problem
Some fascinating insights into how Netflix leverages data to predict OOMs in their client applications.
Monitoring app performance. OpenTelemetry & Jaeger
This engineer shares their experience adopting OpenTelemetry and Jaeger through this concise tutorial. Good stuff.
Vertical CPU Scaling: Reduce Cost of Capacity and Increase Reliability
How Uber leverages their utilization metrics to automate resource allocation across their fleet. Some insightful examples that should be applicable elsewhere.
Monitoring Kubernetes — With Prometheus And Nagstamon
I haven’t personally heard of this status monitor tool before, but I can see why some folks might use it. I do like that you can trigger certain actions right from the desktop.
Introduction to OpenTelemetry & Distributed Tracing
A multi-part continuing series looking at distributed tracing, why to consider OpenTelemetry, instrumenting a sample project, and using Elasticsearch for persistent trace storage (with an upcoming article on custom identifiers).
Building a resilient system: Our journey to observability at Intercom
How Intercom engineers re-evaluated their observability tooling, which compromises they had to make, and how they achieved increased adoption across the company.
At Chronosphere, we’re constantly thinking about what’s next in observability. That’s why we want to provide a new outlet to engage with the community on the latest developments, solutions, and philosophies in the observability space. Fancy yourself a cloud native enthusiast like us? Check out our new YouTube series covering all things observability here. (SPONSORED)
Release of Prometheus 2.37 - Long-Term Support
The Prometheus project recently shipped version 2.37, their first “LTS” release with a six-month support lifecycle (in contrast to their usual six-_week_ cycle).
How we improved Grafana Mimir query performance by up to 10x
Grafana Labs explains their new query sharding functionality for Mimir. If I’m being honest, this feels like a leaky abstraction that I shouldn’t have to think about, but at least they’re trying to educate users on how to leverage it.
How to Monitor PHP-FPM with Prometheus
A quick tutorial for getting up and running with the PHP-FPM exporter for Prometheus.
Pg-agent – a Postgres exporter for Prometheus focusing on query performance
The folks at Coroot have developed pg-agent, an alternate PostgreSQL exporter for Prometheus they claim is superior for monitoring query performance statistics.
Tools
“A Prometheus exporter for Postgres focusing on query performance statistics”
“Nagstamon is a status monitor for the desktop. It connects to multiple Nagios, Icinga, Opsview, Centreon, Op5 Monitor/Ninja, Checkmk Multisite, Thruk and monitos monitoring servers.”
Job Opportunities
Software Engineer - Reliability at Figma (US Remote)
Senior Software Engineer at Six Nines (US Remote)
See you next week!
– Jason (@obfuscurity) Monitoring Weekly Editor