Blog | Monitoring Weekly

Monitoring Weekly newsletter is back!

ICYMI, the Monitoring Weekly newsletter has been on a bit of a hiatus for a while. As Mike Julian stepped aside to work on some larger projects, it was my intent to quickly resume the newsletter. Unfortunately, as we’re all too aware, sometimes life happens and you get sidetracked. Regardless,...

March 2019 Announcement: A New Day is Born

Great news! Mike Julian and Corey Quinn (of Last Week in AWS/Screaming in the Cloud fame) are doing something together: a brand new company. We are merging our companies (Aster Labs and Observable Group on my side, and the Quinn Advisory Group on Corey’s) into a new company known as...

Monitoring & Observability 2019 Predictions

Observability’s buzzwordiness will remain, but the solutions are going to get more interesting and widespread. A lot of existing monitoring vendors are already working on implementing tracing features, and I expect we’ll start to see more from them in the area of high cardinality data support. By the end of...

How To Improve On-Call

Many people bemoan their on-call, and certainly, on-call can seriously suck. Everything from constant alerts to becoming burnt-out makes on-call duties particularly difficult. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Here are some of the best resources around for how to make your on-call much better–pleasureable, even! Articles...

Monitoring With Prometheus

Prometheus has taken the monitoring world by storm over the last few years, coming from seeming-obscurity to being the second project adopted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and one of the most-talked-about monitoring tools in those working in modern, highly-scaled web infrastructure. Where do I start? Monitoring,...

The top 5 best books on monitoring

Many people’s first stop when improving monitoring is to buy a few great books. Rather than spending your time slogging through Amazon’s search results, let me save you the trouble: here are my top five books on monitoring, in no particular order. The Art of Monitoring by James...

What Driving a Jalopy Taught Me About Monitoring

Driving old, beat-up cars is both a treat and a nightmare, especially when it comes to figuring out why they’ve stopped working (this time). In many ways, diagnosing issues with any old car feels not-at-all dissimilar to monitoring for and diagnosing failures in software. In this talk, I walk through...

What is "observability"?

The topic of “observability” has been getting a lot more mainstream discussion lately. If you’re interested in learning more about what it is, what it isn’t, and what it means for your own monitoring efforts, look no further: this list of articles is your one-stop-shop for learning all about it....