Issue 208
Plenty of variety in this week’s collection, with stories covering everything from logging, metrics and tracing to service levels and runbooks. Oh, and the Learning From Incidents conference released their videos, so make sure to check those out too! 🍩☕📈
This issue is sponsored by:
Regardless of where you are on your incident management maturity journey, there’s a right next step you can take. Learn about three areas of focus — roles, services, and retros — why they’re important, and how to improve at any level in "3 ways to improve your incident management program in 2023."
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
Managing high availability at Intercom
I love this post from one of Intercom’s engineering leaders on how they instrument availability into their organization with a combination of culture, technical foundations, and risk management. Someone please make this into a podcast.
Everyone knows the importance of runbooks, but so few teams invest and care for them properly. Here are some tips to get you started.
Embracing the Multi-Party Dilemma: Learning from Incidents Across Company Boundaries
I missed most of the Learning From Incidents (LFI) conference last month, but this talk on collaborative incident response between companies really stood out to me. The full playlist is available for viewing here.
Understanding Distributed Tracing with a Message Bus
A comparison of traditional OpenTelemetry span relationships versus span links, in the context of debugging a message bus. Good stuff.
Grafana Labs Observability Survey 2023
I’m pretty skeptical of industry surveys but they generally yield some interesting data. This one is no different in either regard, but I wish they’d be more transparent about how the survey was conducted.
Service Level Agreements (SLAs), Objectives (SLOs), and Indicators (SLIs)
Service Levels are a key concept for Site Reliability Engineering, and we use them for understanding the health of any service. This post offers a quick primer on each, with some brief but helpful examples.
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What you’re missing without profiling: An Introduction to Pyroscope
I’m new to Pyroscope, but this looks like an interesting project for continuous profiling of your application.
InfluxDB Error: error authorizing query
Monitoring the health of any time-series database is crucial, and InfluxDB is no different in this regard. This admin shares a quick tip for ensuring you have access to its internal statistics.
Observability Concept in Prometheus
This article goes well beyond the titular subject, diving into a range of observability related topics. I would have appreciated a less biased look at pull versus push (there are strong advantages for the latter), but it’s an informative read nonetheless.
KEDA: Autoscaling Kubernetes apps using Prometheus
Autoscaling is one of those things that always sounds better in theory than in practice. Regardless, I love having it in my toolkit, and with this guide you can have it scaling based on your Prometheus metrics in no time.
Java Logging Frameworks: Log4j vs Logback vs Log4j2 vs SLF4
A comprehensive comparison of five of the most popular logging frameworks for Java applications.
Tools
“Pyroscope is an open source continuous profiling platform.”
Events
Monitorama PDX 2023 - June 26-28 (Portland, OR)
Monitorama is returning to Portland, OR next summer. The 2022 conference was a fantastic event and I look forward to seeing you all again in 2023.
See you next week!
– Jason (@obfuscurity) Monitoring Weekly Editor