Issue 219
I really enjoyed the hands-on nature of this week’s issue, with some production stories and more evidence that OpenTelemetry is worth all the attention it’s been getting lately. If you’re a network geek, make sure to check out the Facebook Millisampler {blog post, video, whitepaper}. Enjoy! 🌞🛶⏰
This issue is sponsored by:
What the Heck is Declarative Deployment?
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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
Improve Your Query Performance in Prometheus with Cortex Query Frontend
An excellent dive into Cortex query performance and the configurations that lead to a better user experience. I really appreciate the author’s explanation of and experimentation with each setting, along with the metrics that track the desired results.
Observability at tb.lx: the key to our product’s success
An engineer at tb.lx talks about their adoption of observability practices and tooling, and how it’s leading to better outcomes for not just their internal teams and business outcomes, but for better understanding customer issues.
Ensuring the Successful Launch of Ads on Netflix
IMHO you can’t do proper monitoring without some manner of baseline performance testing before going to production. I love this post from Netflix on how they leveraged replay traffic to ensure the smooth rollout of a major new feature.
A fine-grained network traffic analysis with Millisampler
You can always count on Facebook to deliver some unique tooling around very challenging technical domains. Their 2022 paper on “microscopic traffic bursts” in the datacenter is a fascinating read. This has recently been followed up with a video and blog post detailing their Millisampler tool designed specifically for inspecting traffic dynamics at sub-second granularity.
A comparison of eBPF Observability vs Agents and Sidecars
I don’t believe that traditional instrumentation approaches are going anywhere, but eBPF is making a strong case for less intrusive metrics collection.
OpenTelemetry Dynamic Integrations
OpenTelemetry already has a strong reputation for portability but this example really underscores just how easy it is to switch your final destination(s) using OTel collectors.
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A similar look at OpenTelemetry collectors, portability, and the variety of configurations possible.
Achieving Observability with Kubernetes and Docker
If you’re already experienced with Kubernetes monitoring you can probably skip this article, but if you know someone new to it this post scratches the surface in the right way to get started with their observability journey.
Using Go middleware to craft your own custom GRPC metrics for Prometheus.
Tools
grpc-ecosystem/go-grpc-middleware
“Golang gRPC Middlewares: interceptor chaining, auth, logging, retries and more.”
Events
Just a few weeks left until everyone’s favorite monitoring conference of the year. I’m super excited to see the new speakers and to hear what everyone has been up to since the conference returned to Portland in 2022. Hope to see you there!
See you next week!
– Jason (@obfuscurity) Monitoring Weekly Editor