This is a journey through three attempts to improve observability which are used to highlight the difference between "better monitoring" and "observability".
I made a vow this year to post one blog post a month, then I didn't post anything at all from May to September. I have some catching up to do. I've also been meaning to transcribe some of the twitter rants that I end up linking back to into blog posts, so if…
This post aims to discuss key monitoring discussion points and to summarise the relevant best practices when instrumenting application performance monitoring. Below are some of the areas we’ll be focusing in on… Terminology. Understand the different types of monitoring. Data collection methods. Frontend monitoring. Make it useful, then actionable. Focus on user impact. Favour organic changes over static thresholds. Send critical and noncritical alarms to different channels.
With containers springing up and down in minutes and VMs coming and going in hours, some sysadmins have neglected their system logs. Log files still provide invaluable insight into how systems operate!