Issue 252
I hope everyone has found their footing with 2024 and starting to find traction with their New Year observability projects. It doesn’t look like OpenTelemetry has lost any steam lately, and if this week’s newsletter is anything to go by, we can expect more of the same in the coming weeks and months. 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
Monitoring Reinvented: Prometheus and Thanos Evolutionary Tale
If you’re feeling the pain of Prometheus scaling or federation, you should definitely read this post. The author does an excellent job filling in the contextual gaps between the Prometheus and Thanos reference documentation.
How to build a centralized logging solution with Grafana Loki
I’m not sure which audience this article is written for (presumably, most folks who might read it already understand the benefits of centralized logging), but it’s still a solid introduction and basic guide to getting started with Grafana Loki.
The Story of Grafana - Episode 4: Evolution
The final video in the episodic documentary of Grafana’s history and evolution. Honestly, it’s been a really good open source success story and I’m thrilled to see them continue to fluorish.
Prerequisites for building an efficient observability system
An overview of the primary organizational (people, policy, etc) and technical (tools) considerations needed for an effective observability culture (my words, not theirs). Share with that executive who’s been pushing back on your asks for {more custom metrics, another observability engineer, etc}.
Lessons learned from using OpenTelemetry with Lambda and Rust for building observable systems, from the POV of an application engineer.
Effective Trace Instrumentation with Semantic Conventions
Fortunately, adopting OpenTelemetry is pretty straightforward. OTOH, instrumenting in a way that’s consistent and leads to successful outcomes can be a very different story. This post does a good job covering some of the more effective conventions.
Writing an Excellent Postmortem
Writing quality postmortems is such an underappreciated skill. Although I wish this post included more examples, it touches on some important aspects and should be considered a jumping-off point to investigating further.
How to conduct a postmortem review meeting
As someone who participates in regular postmortems (we call them “learning reviews”), the points in this article resonate with me. Ironically, the best way to get better at postmortem reviews is to have more of them.
Analyze and debug Quarkus based AWS Lambda functions with X-Ray
I don’t personally know anyone who uses Quarkus (to be fair, I don’t use Java), but if you do this looks like an easy way to get traces out of your Lambda functions.
Events
Monitorama PDX 2024 - $100 off General Admission
Early Bird tickets are gone, but Monitoring Weekly readers can still save $100 off General Admission tickets with the MWEEKLY2024 discount code. This year’s agenda is shaping up to be a banger, don’t miss out!
See you next week!
– Jason (@obfuscurity) Monitoring Weekly Editor