What the Beats family of log shippers are to Logstash, so Fluent Bit is to Fluentd — a lightweight log collector, that can be installed as an agent on edge servers in a logging architecture, shipping to a selection of output destinations.

Elasticsearch comes with good out-of-the-box Garbage Collection settings. So good in fact that the Definitive Guide recommends not changing them. While we agree that most use-cases wouldn’t benefit from GC tuning, especially when it turns out there simply isn’t enough heap, there are exceptions. We found that G1 GC, for example, works well on big heaps. This allows you to have less, bigger nodes, which in turn means less network traffic in a large cluster.

Opinions vary in recent online discussions regarding systems and software observability. Some state that observability is a replacement for monitoring. Others that they are parallel mechanisms, or that one is a subset of another (not to mention where tracing fits into such a hierarchy). Monitoring Weekly recently provided a helpful list of resources for an overview of this discussion, as well as some practical applications of observability.