Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Hulu, the entertainment streaming platform, needed a solution to scale up its internal application and infrastructure monitoring platform as it grew beyond 1 million metrics per second. The solution it created combines two open source tools— InfluxDB, a time series database, and Kafka, an event-streaming platform. It’s not just global enterprises like Hulu that have access to world-class tools and infrastructure to achieve their business goals.

When I started at Grafana in January, I was accustomed to working with private clouds and on-prem infrastructure, so nearly everything in my role here as a senior software engineer for the Grafana Mimir customer squad was new to me. I was new to Golang, Docker, Kubernetes, gRPC, public cloud services, etc. Kubernetes has been especially challenging. In my work on Grafana Mimir and Grafana Enterprise Metrics, I experience k8s in one of two extremes.

If there was a question on if an enterprise needed an observability pipeline in 2019 or 2020, we now know the answer is: yes. The observability data management methods of the 2010s aren’t going to work in the 2020s. Data is growing too fast for us to ignore, and the need to gain intelligence from said data continues to grow in importance. Data (and access to it) is becoming a competitive edge for many enterprises today.

APIs have existed nearly as long as websites themselves. But because APIs are primarily consumed by programs instead of people, they tend to be less visible than applications or sites directly accessed by users. The result: APIs often receive far less attention from a site reliability engineering (SRE) and monitoring perspective than other parts of application environments.

With the rise of microservices and distributed systems, more and more data migrates through APIs. So, let’s look at the best ways to monitoring APIs using authentication.

Given the strategic importance of the cloud and size of cloud expenditures, it’s critical for enterprises to have solid controls in place to manage it all. According to our latest research, however, while most organizations agree with that sentiment, very few have put it into practice. There are distinct but related disciplines that come into play: FinOps and cloud governance. In this two-part series, we explore current state of each.

The term “essential” is thrown around pretty loosely these days. That new show about the hospital (no, not that one… not that one either… yeah that one) is advertised as essential viewing. A newly-released track by a hip hop artist that describes how little they need to release new tracks in order to live much, much better than the rest of us? That’s essential listening.