Issue 214
This week’s issue is unabashedly focused on talks, topics, and recaps from the recent KubeCon + Observability Day Europe 2023. Sounds like everyone had a great time in Amsterdam, I might have to start making plans for next year. 😍✈☕
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: The Star of KubeCon 2023
A recap from KubeCon with a particular emphasis on how OpenTelemetry continues to dominate observability instrumentation and what might be next.
People Over Technology: a micro strategy
A heartfelt reminder that tools are only as powerful as the humans that wield them. This article reminds me a lot of Dan McKinley’s Choose Boring Technology post from years back.
A CNCF playlist of the recorded talks from Observability Day Europe 2023.
Service Resilience: Strategies to Prevent Cascading Failures in Large-Scale Distributed Systems
Service reliability and resilience is a huge motivator for why we care about observable systems and monitoring as a discipline. This post looks at what leads to cascading failures and how we can prevent them.
Collector Pipelines Visual Language
A very unique look at how we might share a common visual language describing the observability systems we run. The referenced KubeCon talk doesn’t appear to be uploaded yet, but I’ll be keeping an eye out.
OpenTelemetry — Understanding SLI and SLO with OpenTelemetry Demo
We’re all pretty familiar with SLOs, but the devil is in the details and many articles only scratch the service on how to use them effectively. This post dives deep on service levels, demonstrating how to get the most out of them with OpenTelemetry and other tools you’re probably already using.
Why You Shouldn’t Fear to Adopt Opentelemetry for Observability
Some strong arguments for adopting OpenTelemetry if you haven’t already.
eBPF Observability Tools Are Not Security Tools
I have to admit I’m feeling some bias while reading the latest post from Brendan Gregg. Personally, I’ve always encouraged a strong partnership between Security and Observability engineers (and continue to do so), but Brendan makes a strong argument that we’re abusing eBPF, at least as it exists within observability products today.
Prometheus’ performance and cardinality in practice
Although Prometheus handles metrics cardinality better than some of its predecessors, it’s not immune to performance concerns when metrics and labels get out of hand. This post explains how to diagnose your own usage and clean up the cruft.
Grafana Security releases
Grafana Labs has released new patch releases to address high and medium severity security fixes, which also includes patches for a critical upstream vulnerability in Golang. The following posts detail the respective impact and mitigations involved.
Events
Monitorama has announced their full agenda for this year’s event. Looks like an awesome collection of topics and speakers. Hope to see you there!
See you next week!
– Jason (@obfuscurity) Monitoring Weekly Editor