Issue 245

This was a surprisingly rich week for fun technical articles, with an emphasis on Kubernetes, Prometheus, and OpenTelemetry. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did! 😸📈☕

Articles & News on monitoring.love

Observability & Monitoring Community Slack

It’s been amazing to see the community grow throughout 2023. We’d love to have you join us and share what you’ve been working on.

From The Community

Simple OpenTelemetry setup in a Kubernetes environment

A quick and easy lab for anyone looking to try out OpenTelemetry with Kubenetes and see what all the hype is about. The guide assumes some basic Python experience and uses auto-instrumentation for simplicity.

OpenTelemetry Collector’s New Filter Processor

Thanks to recent changes in the OpenTelemetry Collector, you can now filter on spans using the Trace State object. This post is a brief recap of the changes and why you should care.

Open source log monitoring: The concise guide to Grafana Loki

I really wish this primer on Grafana Loki existed four years ago when I was making a case for our next logging platform. At the time, the maintainers struggled (imho) to make a compelling case for why Loki was different (besides “Prometheus labels!”) or why I should clear. It’s pretty clear the project has found its audience since then and I’m happy to see continued competition in the space.

Heads-up that OpenTelemetry has begun rolling out breaking changes to HTTP attributes to some libraries. Even if you’re not affected already (Java and .NET developers), you probably will before long.

Observability - Licensing Challenges and Tips To Consider

We don’t typically think very often about licensing and contract concerns for Observability software, at least not until we need to procure something. Unfortunately, this means that our muscle memory (and hard lessons learned) in this area atrophies quickly. This post does a good job capturing many of the concerns and how to prioritize them according to your own needs.

AWS: CloudWatch – Multi source query: collecting metrics from an external Prometheus

Not sure how many folks want to pull in externally sourced metrics into CloudWatch like this, but it was an interesting announcement from Amazon nonetheless. This overview will show you what to expect if you want to try it out for yourself.

Anomaly Alerts for monitoring using Grafana and Prometheus

I love me some anomaly detection algorithms. This post takes a look at how to apply the 3-sigma rule to construct your own PromQL queries and alerts for common infrastructure metrics.

The Story of Grafana - Episode 2: Community

The next episode of Grafana’s documentary on their beginnings. Hard to believe it’s been almost 10 years since Torkel’s big reveal at Monitorama.

Events

Monitorama PDX 2024 - Early Bird Tickets

Early Bird tickets are running out soon, make sure to grab yours while you can before prices go up for General Admission seating. And don’t forget to submit your CFP proposal before the deadline!

See you next week!

– Jason (@obfuscurity) Monitoring Weekly Editor