Issue 233
Plenty of OpenTelemetry goodness this week, along with a new project from Grafana and an illuminating presentation from Jez Humble. Enjoy! 💡📟🌈
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
Centralized Log Management in AWS: A Primer
A strong case for centralized logging in the cloud, but with a sober look at the challenges to keep in mind as you plan your architecture. Looking forward to the next post in this series.
Why Is My App SLOw? Defining Reliability in Platform Engineering
An excellent talk on distributions, SLOs, and 2-sigma from Jez Humble at GOTO Aarhus last month.
AWS & OpenTelemetry strikes back: Tail-based Sampling
I’m super not a fan of sampling traces, but also acknowledge there are some practical applications of this for specific workloads. Definitely a good tool to have in your observability toolbox.
OpenTelemetry Gotchas: Phantom Spans
As someone who works on a product used by “customers of customers”, this one hits a little close to home. Still, it’s a fun read from the author of the OpenTelemetry implementation for Haskell.
Like many of you, I appreciate OpenTelemetry for its capabilities, but even moreso I love it for its ability to protect us from vendor lock-in. This might be its one true killer feature.
Open source ebpf auto-instrumentation with Grafana Beyla
Grafana announced a new auto-instrumentation eBPF tool that looks like a super easy way to start capturing spans without any manual probe instrumentation. If you know anyone that’s been dragging their feet on tracing, this could be a great way for them to try it out without a significant investment.
10 Best Free PagerDuty Alternatives of 2023
I generally don’t like to include these “top N” lists, but this looks like a well-researched article (or very convincing AI content) on free offerings in the PagerDuty space.
Grafana Promtail as simple “push gateway” for logs
A quick example for setting up Promtail to forward your logs to Grafana Loki.
Tools
“OpenTelemetry support for the Haskell programming language”
See you next week!
– Jason (@obfuscurity) Monitoring Weekly Editor