Issue 023
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Monitoring News, Articles, and Blog posts
Sensu Summit 2017 (videos)
With lightning turnaround speed, the video recordings from Sensu Summit last week are up! I linked to Sean Porter’s slidedeck on the future of Sensu last week, and now you get the videos–along with a bunch of other great Sensu-related talks from the likes of Yelp, GE, GoDaddy, and many more.
Full disclosure: My company is a Sensu Partner. I receive no consideration, financial or otherwise, from linking this article.
Starting Down the Path of APM for the Elastic Stack
Just yesterday it felt like APM, logging, and system/app metrics were all very separate things. Lately, however, we’ve been starting to see the SaaS tool market converge (Datadog + Datadog APM, Librato + Traceview, New Relic APM + New Relic Infrastructure, etc). The latest is from the folks at Elastic, who have announced that their own APM, Opbeat, has entered pre-alpha, and it’s integrated with the rest of the Elastic Stack. If you’re running the Elastic Stack, this could be very interesting indeed.
Grafana + Prometheus users rejoice: a super slick updated query editor is on the way. This demo is pretty great–I can’t wait to try it out.
Observability: What’s In A name?
Way back in the wild days of the 90s, monitoring was simple: you built a thing and slapped a cronjob on it to tell you when it went wrong. Nagios allowed us to do essentially that same at-scale. Fast-forward to today and the world of infrastructure and applications and how we monitor it all is vastly different. Has terminology caught up with the modern times yet? People much smarter than I have been asking this question for a while (@lusis’s post from 2011, @grepory’s talk from 2016) and the trend continues with this article. I think it will be very interesting to see where this leads us.
Improving Cloud Security Visibility with ChatOps
Security in internal operations always fascinates me. Some companies take the head-in-sand approach while others take up the challenge of building something both usable and secure. This article from Datadog talks about how they handle keeping their AWS accounts secure, complete with an actual workflow that seems like it might be pretty reusable elsewhere without a lot of work.
VerizonDigital/vflow: Enterprise Network Flow Collector (IPFIX, sFlow, Netflow)
If you’ve had the (dis)pleasure of working with flow data, you know how ahem “still in the works” the tooling ecosystem is. So when a reader sent me this last week, I basically flipped out: this is amazing. Flow data as JSON instead of awful plaintext structure, and the licensing fee isn’t the same as the GDP of a small nation-state (it’s FOSS!).
For those deep in the web page/frontend performance world, the browser Performance API is a well-trod path. Starting with Chrome 60, there’s a new addition to the API: Paint Timing. Rather than simple page-level and resource-level metrics, we now get metrics around painting as well. This article explains the new API, why it matters, and how you can use it.
About your friendly editor
I’m Mike Julian, a monitoring/observability consultant and author of the upcoming O’Reilly book, Practical Monitoring. I help companies improve their application and infrastructure monitoring. Interested in working together? You can find me at AsterLabs.io.
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– Mike (@mike_julian) Monitoring Weekly editor