Prometheus is an open source and free to use metrics collection and storage solution. It's used extensively in the industry for monitoring many different technologies. In this article I will show you how to get Prometheus up and running as a binary, a container running in Docker, and inside Kubernetes.
In software observability, we often talk about three signal types - metrics, logs, and distributed traces. More recently I've been hearing about profiles as another signal type. In this article I will explain the different observability signals and when to use them in a clear and concise way.
Automatic instrumentation is great, but to get the most out of your monitoring you often need to instrument your code. In this article I am going to explain how to instrument a Node.js express app with custom metrics using the Prometheus prom-client package. Although this article specifically addresses Node.js and express, my hope is that the general concepts are applicable to other languages too.
Observability has become a bit of a buzzword in the industry for the last few years. Exactly what "observability" means depends on who you ask, but most people would agree its about both: There's plenty of content out there telling you how to implement observability, or what good looks like. But what about bad observability? What are some anti-patterns to watch out for?
You’re part of a data-driven engineering team. You have a rich, complex, and dynamic set of tools but you’re struggling to discover and share insights from all that data. So, you're looking for a platform that will help unify it all. Naturally, you want to compare Grafana vs. Power BI - the big names. Plus, there's a new player on the block - SquaredUp.
In November/December 2022 I attended AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. It was certainly an experience for this small town kid from New Zealand, and one that I took a lot away from. While I was at the conference, I took the time to walk around and take notes. In this article I will share the trends that I observed which I think will have an impact on SRE work in 2023 and beyond, including: ...and others.
