Issue 085
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Latest Articles on monitoring.love
What driving an old 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.
From The Community
Humble Book Bundle: DevOps by O’Reilly (pay what you want and help charity)
My book, along with several other incredible books, is on sale via a Humble Bundle right now. There’s ~$600 worth of top-notch books in the bundle–all yours at a fraction of the price. Bonus: a portion of the proceeds go to support Code For America. Seems like a win for everyone.
How to instrument Go code with custom expvar metrics
Considering some Golang apps and wondering about instrumentation? Here you go.
Logging in general and in ASP.NET Core
Don’t worry .NET folk, we’ve got you covered too.
Talking Technology: Charity Majors – Times Open
There are a lot of fantastic quotes in here, but since I’ve got alerting on the mind, this one stuck out to me: “… every time you get paged should really be about an unknown-unknown.”
thecasualcoder/tztail: tztail (TimeZoneTAIL) allows you to view logs in the timezone you want
Exactly as the title says. Kinda cool. Just remember: always write them in UTC; anything else is a nightmare.
Why Your Server Monitoring (Still) Sucks
I wrote an article for Linux Journal recently on the top five reasons your monitoring still sucks.
Scaling Time Series Data Storage — Part II
Following up on Part 1 from January 2018, the architecture hit a breaking point and needed a full reworking. Part 2 goes into what the problems were and the new architecture that’s come out of it.
Flux 0.7 Technical Preview - InfluxData
I know a whole lot of you are InfluxDB users, so this will be useful: the new Flux language is now in InfluxDB 1.7, but disabled by default. Turn it on and have some fun playing with the query language. Personally, I’m a huge fan of the explicit-over-implicit syntax. The Grafana datasource plugin is still in beta, though.
If you’re still wondering why heatmaps are awesome, this article has some great graphs to show their value and why other visualizations fall short for some data/questions.
The Problem with Percentiles – Aggregation brings Aggravation
Say it with me, now: stop aggregating percentiles.
FlameScope Pattern Recognition
You’re a fan of flame graphs, right? The author of those, Brendan Gregg, has come up with a new visualization, subsecond offset heatmaps, and a tool to help with them: FlameScope.
Measuring Performance With Server Timing
This article goes into some depth on a W3C proposal currently making its way through committee: the HTTP Server-Timing header. The header is intended to pass arbitrary metrics via the HTTP response, such as duration, cache result, or whatever you want. The examples section in the proposal gives some ideas about what’s possible. I’m really excited about this one.
| **[High Leverage | Ep. #1, Monitoring Observability with Monitoring Weekly’s Mike Julian](https://www.heavybit.com/library/podcasts/high-leverage/ep-1-monitoring-observability-with-monitoring-weeklys-mike-julian/)** |
Joe Ruscio, founder of Librato and now General Partner at Heavybit, and I muse about monitoring for a while.
Why NOT to Build a Time-Series Database
It’s harder than it sounds as the author would certainly know, being the CEO and cofounder of Outlyer, a monitoring product.
This issue is sponsored by:
Anyone remember Writely? No? I don’t blame you–that was 12 years ago, after all.
I’m sure most of you use what Writely turned into, though: Google Docs. Now one of founders behind the groundbreaking-at-the-time Writely (seriously, do you remember what we did before gdocs?!) has turned their attention to the world of logging and monitoring. You should check it out.
Events
London Monitoring Winter Meetup - November 27, 2018 - London, UK
FOSDEM2019: Monitoring Room CFP Open - February 2-3, 2018 - Brussels, Belgium
GrafanaCon LA 2019 - February 25-26, 2018 - Los Angeles, CA USA
Jobs
Technical Evangelist - Wavefront - Location Flexible
I had the pleasure of speaking with the hiring manager and it sounds like a really awesome gig. If you’re into Ops/SRE/DevOps and love monitoring, click through to check it out and apply.
Want your job listed here? Why not submit a post to the job board? It’s only $199/ad for 30 days.
See you next week!
– Mike (@mike_julian) Monitoring Weekly Editor