A varied collection of articles and guides this week, with a little bit of something for everyone. My personal favorites included the journey to Incident Management mastery from Dyninno and a post on OpenTelemetry trace field continuity. Enjoy! 💝🕸🔎

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

Dyninno’s Incident Management: an Introduction

Incident Management is all-too-often one of those responsibilities that either gets ignored or outsourced (poorly) to vendor software. Done right, it also tends to be cloaked in secrecy behind a corporate veil. So I love it when a company not only journals their experience but is open to share it publicly.

API load testing: A beginner’s guide

Grafana Labs recently published a series of guides for load testing with k6. This post in particularly jumped out at me because API load testing is such an overlooked and underappreciated practice.

Avoid Stubbing Your Toe on Telemetry Changes

Continuity in metric names or trace fields can be a major hassle without the right planning. This article looks at some of the approaches for handling this with OpenTelemetry.

Cassandra Unleashed: How We Enhanced Cassandra Fleet’s Efficiency and Performance

Anyone else remember when Cassandra was making significant strides into metrics storage and retrieval? Feels like an eternity ago, but there are still plenty of companies out there using it for bespoke collection systems. If you’re one of those folks, you’ll appreciate this look at how Doordash engineers have optimized their fleet for cost savings and performance gains.

Improving upon my OpenTelemetry Tracing demo

An updated guide for trying out OpenTelemetry and Python apps, this time with a more simplified database setup.

DataCentral: Uber’s Observability and Chargeback Platform

I always enjoy these “big data observability” posts from Uber. Even if I can’t use their actual systems, the way they think about designing and using them offers some great insights and inspiration for my own work.

How to use Prometheus for web application monitoring

A solid introduction to Prometheus with a more focused look at using it for synthetic monitoring of a website.

Monitoring of Postgres in a Node.js application with Prometheus and OpenTel

Example for monitoring your PostgreSQL use within a Node application.

Tools

christiangalsterer/node-postgres-prometheus-exporter

“A prometheus exporter exposing metrics for node-postgres.”

Events

Monitorama PDX 2024 - CFP Last Chance!

If you’re quick to read this newsletter, you have hours remaining to submit a talk proposal for Monitorama PDX 2024. The CFP closes tonight at midnight UTC on February 4. We’re still looking for individuals who have fun and interesting stories to share from their own respective observability journey. Hope to be reading your soon!

See you next week!

– Jason (@obfuscurity) Monitoring Weekly Editor