Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As we’ve rolled out Loki internally at Grafana Labs, we wanted logs beyond just simple applications. Specifically while debugging outages due to config, Kubernetes, or node restarts, we’ve found Kubernetes events to be super useful. The Kubernetes events feature allows you to see all of the changes in a cluster, and you can get a simple overview by just retrieving them: This also captures when nodes go unresponsive and when a pod has been killed along with the reason.

RabbitMQ is an open source message broker that was built to implement AMQP in 2007, and over the past twelve years has grown to include HTTP, STOMP, SMTP and other protocols via an ever growing list of plugins.

If you are reading this article, you’re probably familiar with syslog, a logging tool that has been around since the 1980s. It is a daemon present in most Linux-based operating systems. By default, syslog (and variants like rsyslog) on Linux systems can be used to forward logs to central syslog servers or monitoring platforms where further analysis can be conducted. That’s useful, but to make the very most of syslog, you also want to be able to analyze log data.

Launched at KubeCon North America last December, Loki is a Prometheus-inspired service that optimizes storage, search, and aggregation while making logs easy to explore natively in Grafana. Loki is designed to work easily both as microservices and as monoliths, and correlates logs and metrics to save users money. Less than a year later, Loki has almost 6,500 stars on GitHub and is now quickly approaching GA.

Today’s web server ecosystem has three big players: IIS, Apache and NGINX. Although only two of them (Apache and, to a lesser extent, NGINX) are cross-platform, it’s increasingly important to be able to work with all three of these servers, because you never know which type of operating system and web server platform you’ll be asked to support. That’s why understanding the nuances of IIS, Apache and NGINX logs is important.

As a student, developing your software engineering skills is about continuous learning and practice. When building software in the real-world, developers are expected to be proficient with a variety of tools and stacks. Internships, class and personal projects provide great opportunities for students to gain the experience needed to become more effective.

Life is about making choices: Coke or Pepsi? Beatles or Stones? Mac or PC? In the world of web servers, the choice used to be between open-source Apache and Microsoft’s IIS. Back in 2004, when everybody had lost interest in the World Wide Web, an upstart web server appeared out of nowhere. Now, just over fifteen years later, NGINX has been rapidly rising in popularity and currently has a 30.8% of the webserver market compared to Apache’s 44.1%.

Launched at KubeCon North America last December, Loki is a Prometheus-inspired service that optimizes storage, search, and aggregation while making logs easy to explore natively in Grafana. Loki is designed to work easily both as microservices and as monoliths, and correlates logs and metrics to save users money.

Nginx is an extremely popular open-source web server serving millions of applications around the world. Second only to Apache, Nginx’s owes its popularity as a web server (it can also serve as a reverse proxy, HTTP cache and load balancer) to the way it efficiently serves static content and overall performance.