Issue 247
I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season. For those of you who had to take the pager over the break, your efforts are truly appreciated. What better way to kick off the New Year than with the first issue of Monitoring Weekly for 2024? Enjoy! 🥂🎶💋
This issue is sponsored by:
A 2023 risk analysis report found that 96% of scanned databases contained open source. Companies are investing in open source because it’s driving innovation, but it requires a different approach. Read 3 key differences between open source observability tools and proprietary observability platforms in this article from Chronosphere.
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
Monitoring guide through operations: how we designed the monitoring of our payment system
I still don’t know what a REX is, but I love when companies are willing to talk publicly about their journey to monitoring bliss.
Rolling out Distributed Tracing
An excellent post on distributed trace that covers possibly the hardest parts… planning, onboarding, and adoption. Anyone who’s ever attempted to help out their engineers by introducing something new (no matter how helpful) knows that it’s never a straightforward path. Gotta do your homework first.
Unleashing the Power of Open Source: Revolutionizing Mainframe Insights with OpenTelemetry
Pretty interesting to hear that even mainframes can be observed with OpenTelemetry. As someone who’s worked around old school IBM hardware, I’m genuinely surprised to hear that open source has finally started to invade those systems.
Best Practices to Prevent Alert Fatigue
Healthy alerting is one of my pet peeves, so I’m grateful to see Datadog tackle this important topic. Yes, this post is heavy on Datadog specifics, but there’s plenty to take away and apply to other systems.
Restricting Label Values in Prometheus via prom-label-proxy
Multi-tenancy and authorization of metrics queries might be the only thing harder in tech than naming. I’d rather we have native support but I’m grateful that helpful tools like prom-label-proxy exist today.
Efficient Application Log Collection and Analysis using OpenTelemetry and Loki
Another Loki “how-to” guide, but with just the right level of detail in their instructions and examples. Well done.
How to integrate Grafana Alerting and Telegram
A quick look at integrating alerts to your Telegram account. Might not be a great idea if your employer is risk averse but probably fine for your personal projects. 😈
Zabbix nodata trigger, really a lifesaver
Zabbix users might find this trigger example helpful. Personally, I’m still struggling to get past Zabbix template configs. #YMMV
Tools
prometheus-community/prom-label-proxy
“The prom-label-proxy can enforce a given label in a given PromQL query, in Prometheus API responses or in Alertmanager API requests.”
Events
Monitorama PDX 2024 - Early Bird Tickets
Early Bird tickets are running out soon, make sure to grab yours while you can before prices go up for General Admission seating. And don’t forget to submit your CFP proposal before the deadline!
See you next week!
– Jason (@obfuscurity) Monitoring Weekly Editor