Issue 195
Another great week of articles, with an emphasis on Kubernetes observability and Prometheus exporters. Great stuff all around. Enjoy! 🚢🐧☕
This issue is sponsored by:
Inside Prometheus: An Open Source System That Changed Technology
Watch this unique documentary film about the origin and mass adoption of Prometheus. Hear from pioneers, engineers, and executives in the Prometheus community–including Chronosphere's Co-Founder, Rob Skillington. Watch the documentary here.
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
Boosting Kubernetes container runtime observability with OpenTelemetry
An excellent post from the official Kubernetes blog on the state of OpenTelemetry support across the K8s component stack.
How we tried using VictoriaMetrics and Thanos at the same time
A story of one company’s attempt to run VMAgent and Thanos together after they hit some Prometheus scaling challenges. Some lessons learned and considerations that may apply to others using these components.
Visual Patterns to Improve Monitoring Dashboards
It can be trendy to hate on dashboards these days. Overzealous vendors love to throw shade on open source approaches, but I’ve also seen the rush to get new services deployed under deadline lead to some truly garbage monitoring pages. Articles like this can help, highlighting design components and organization that can lead to more consistent and user-friendly experiences.
Bring AWS Notifications Into Your Slack Channel
Most readers are probably already familiar with AWS Chatbot, but if you’re not, here’s a guide for integrating your AWS CloudWatch notifications (among other things) into Slack.
Monitoring stack setup — Part 4: Blackbox exporter
A thorough look at Prometheus’ blackbox exporter including installation, configuration, testing, scraping, and relabeling.
An introduction to software sidecars and why they’re useful for modern application observability.
Countdown to Christmas … could you be a winner?
The holidays are almost upon us, and to celebrate, we’ve launched our 24-day Advent Calendar, packed with insight into SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability and the chance to win prizes! Follow the link, and be sure to check back each day! (SPONSORED)
Grafana high severity security fixes
Some high severity patches for CVEs affecting Grafana and their Synthetic Monitoring Agent.
Observability Solutions with OpenTelemetry + OpenSearch
If you’re curious about OpenSearch (Amazon’s fork of Elasticsearch), this article introduces the concepts, compatible services, and demonstrates a basic setup. For more details about why it exists, and which project makes sense for your needs, I would encourage you to watch this video.
How to Monitor MongoDB: Key Metrics for High Performance
A solid resource for anyone maintaining a MongoDB cluster.
Navigation and internationalization improvements to everyone’s favorite open source dashboard tool.
Tools
“a prometheus exporter that gets some metrics from the mastodon api”
Events
Monitorama PDX 2023 - June 26-28 (Portland, OR)
Monitorama is returning to Portland, OR next summer. The 2022 conference was a fantastic event and I look forward to seeing you all again in 2023.
See you next week!
– Jason (@obfuscurity) Monitoring Weekly Editor