Observability

As many large-scale events start to feel they’re close to “getting back to normal,” this year’s KubeCon EU was the second online, and while it lacked any large announcements, there was plenty of consolidation and maturing of concepts.

For metrics stored within Prometheus, the Prometheus Querying Language (PromQL) is the main way to query and retrieve the results you are looking for. Chronosphere supports querying metrics data using PromQL and Graphite functions, but as PromQL is the most popular option we see customers use. PromQL has some differences to other query languages you might have used. Here is an overview guide to get you started.

If you need to reduce the amount of metrics data stored in your time series database (TSDB) or improve query performance, there are generally two common methods to do so.

Metrics and managing and understanding them is an essential part of any modern complex application. As with any active and busy technical ecosystem, there is a proliferation of competing open source monitoring standards. A handful emerges as the most popular solutions. Slowly, the community creates a standard that most projects follow in some way.

Welcome to the first installment of a monthly look back at the latest news in observability and the related cloud-native landscape. If you have any stories you think are worth considering, get in touch.

How did you enjoy the first installment of this regular look back at a month in observability? Well, it’s back again, and as August and vacations draw to a close, the amount of news and content to tell you about is increasing. It’s time to get started, and as always, get in touch if you have stories for inclusion.

As conference season slowly draws to a close, and we fill that few months between the end of summer and the start of the seemingly never-ending holiday season (hemisphere and region-dependent naturally), there has been a flurry of activity in the observability ecosystem, so it’s time to, err, cast an eye over it 😬.

Distributed tracing tools help you track a request through an application or system that consists of multiple applications, services, and infrastructure. This gives you a deeper understanding of what is happening within the system through graphical representations of how much time the request took on each step. A span is the building block of any distributed trace, with each component in a service contributing a span to the distributed workflow. There are a handful of well known open source tracing tools, and another handful of lesser known ones. Most work in similar ways, with one or two nuanced differences, and this post walks through most of them to help find the right tracing tool for you.

One of the most important capabilities of an observability platform is alerting. How quickly can you know when something is wrong, so you can rapidly triage and remediate that problem? Chronosphere recently released a new approach to defining alerts called “Monitors,” which gives users more flexibility with alerts and makes them easier to create and manage.

Welcome to 2022 🥳 and a year that already promises to be as lively and active for Observability.

As big fans of bestowing the positives of distributed tracing, we’re excited to see so many others in the observability space discussing the subject.

The sun is rearing its sleepy head across much of the northern hemisphere, making news a little quiet this month. But we have a few choice items for you, and with the first in-person conference seasons in a while on the horizon, there’s plenty more to come!

Observability is fast changing from a practice that those close to engineering knew was useful, to a practice that everyone knows is useful for technical and business reasons.

Yes, KubeCon returned with vengeance to Europe, and over 7000 cloud native hungry folks made their way to Valencia to see what was new in the world of Kubernetes and cloud computing. There was a lot that happened, and for more detail, read our wrap up post, the rest of this newsletter summarizes some of the most relevant topics.

Phew! A group of Chronospherians attended Monitorama back in person in Portland and we had a whistlestop (partial) week meeting customers and observability enthusiasts. I had a talk which sparked a lot of interesting discussion, we hosted a very successful whisk(e)y tasting, and all in all, had a great time.

Well hello there! If you’re reading this monthly round up of Observability (and related) news, then you’re one of the few not on vacation and I thank you 🙇 . That last sentence was basically me making an excuse for not having too much to write about, but there’s just enough

The silly season, or the quiet season for news depending on your perspective and country. Still, before we all prepare for packed announcement times in September and October here’s a few observability and cloud native related nuggets from across the interwebs.

Thoughtworks’ Technology Radar is a regular time to take a look at what experienced industry experts think might be the next wave of tools, practices, and technologies to consider or stop using.