Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

You may have noticed a few changes around here. If you explore our new website, you’ll notice new products, expansions to our open source libraries, significant contributions to our favorite open source project, OpenTelemetry, and new integrations with Google Cloud. You might just think we’re taking “new year new me” a little too seriously, but in fact we’ve been planning some of these changes for a long time. It all stems from our firm belief in open source technology.

Speedscale is proud to announce its Centralized Log Collection capability. When diagnosing the source of problems in your API, more information is better. For most engineers, the diagnosis process usually starts with the application logs. Unfortunately, logs are usually either discarded or stored in Observability systems that engineers don’t have direct access to. Compounding this issue is that the log information is typically not correlated to what calls were made against the API.

A couple months ago, a Splunk admin told us about a bad experience with data downtime. Every morning, the first thing she would do is check that her company’s data pipelines didn’t break overnight. She would log into her Splunk dashboard and then run an SPL query to get last night’s ingest volume for their main Splunk index. This was to make sure nothing looked out of the ordinary.

All Cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Oracle Cloud offer Object Storage solutions to economically store large volumes of data and retrieve it on demand. It’s far cheaper to store one petabyte of data in object storage than in block storage. As AWS S3 has become the standard, many on-premise storage appliance vendors have incorporated S3 APIs to store and retrieve data. Oracle wisely continued that trend to OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure).

A new year is a chance to have a new start, and one thing that it’s a great opportunity to think about is the monitoring and observability platform you’re using for your applications. If you’ve been using a legacy monitoring system, you’ve probably heard about observability all over the ‘net and want to figure out if this is really something you need to care about.

Beep, beep, beeeeeeeep. Read path SLO page, again. And I’ve almost found the noisy neighbor! That was me. And will probably be me again at some point in the future. As we continue to scale up the team that builds and runs Grafana Loki at Grafana Labs, I’ve decided to record how I find and diagnose problems in Loki.