Observability Lifts Off!

Welcome!

Welcome to the first edition of the fortnightly Observability 360 newsletter!

Observability Lifts Off!

Why this newsletter - and why now? Well, I believe that it is time for observability to take its place as a first class citizen amongst IT disciplines. For many years it has existed as a practice in Infrastructure, software development and later DevOps teams.

The DevOps culture, in particular, has led the movement from the reactive posture of monitoring to the more proactive stance of gaining maximum visibility and responsiveness. Increasingly, also, businesses rely on data and analytics to reduce cost, maximize RoI and achieve competitive advantage. The migration to the cloud and rise of distributed architectures has seen the rise of major players such as DataDog, New Relic, Dynatrace and Splunk - offering integrated systems to deal with the scale and complexity of this ever-changing environment.

A Specialism In Its Own Right

All of these trends have coalesced, increasingly rapidly, to a state where Observability ranks as a specialism in its own right, one with its own ecosystem of technologies, concepts and practitioners. This process appears to be accelerating at pace and we are now at a point where the procurement, configuration, customisation and maintenance of observability stacks is a knowledge domain in its own right.

The bigger picture

The overall aim is to help spread knowledge, disseminate best practice and hopefully contribute to raising the profile of Observability as a discipline. This newsletter is not intended to be just a bulletin or a monologue. Hopefully the newsletter (and other channels coming soon) will help to support dialogue and collaboration. Feedback, contributions and input will be gratefully received - just drop an email to [email protected]

NEWS

Grafana Release Pyroscope 1.10

The Grafana product conveyor belt never seems to stop. Pyroscop claims to be “the most efficient and scalable open source profiling database, offering both low overhead, client-side instrumentation and reliable server-side capabilities.“ Profiling is a hot topic - OpenTelemetry are working on a including it as one of the fundamental observability signals. We will no doubt be hearing a lot more on this topic. Click on the button below to read more in a really fascinating Grafana blog article.

OpenTelemetry Tracing Support Comes To Docker!!

Up until now Docker containers have been something of a black box in terms of observability. That all changes with Docker v25 - which introduces much welcomed support for OpenTelemetry tracing. Full OpenTelemetry support is still very much a work in progress but this is a very significant step.

Incident.io launch Catalog

A well-oiled Incident Management process is imperative for good governance and excellent customer service. This system from Incident.io seeks to give you the edge by merging your incident response with your technical and organisational graph.

New Relic release operator for Kubernetes monitoring

More and more workloads are being migrated to Kubernetes. Operators are a powerful tool for assisting administrators in automating the management of K8S workloads. New Relic havenow created their own operator which will simplify tasks such as deployment, scaling and upgrades

EVENTS

Zabbix Summit 2023

Zabbix is a leader in network monitoring, with a range of powerful and highly scalable solutions - and what’s more it’s open source. Engineers at big name clients such as London Underground will be discussing how they use Zabbix to monitor at scale. It’s not all SNMP and GeoWidgets - the event also includes a “Fun-Part”. You can see the full agena here:

VIDEOS & TUTORIALS

A fascinating dive into instrumenting GraphQL with OpenTelemetry:

Melissa McKay from JFrog and Damian Currey from NGinx have produced a series of videos on the Software Development/DevOps lifecycle. In the final video they cover observability. It is a nice refresher on general principles from experts in the field with a really relaxed presentational style:

SOCIAL

The Grafana team look back on some of their achievements over their first ten years:

The SigNoz project positions itself as an open source alternative to DataDog. That is setting the bar pretty high but, hey, why not shoot for the stars. Anyway, they are having a good week as they enjoy the warm glow of trending on Github:

Docs

Learning eBPF by Liz Rice

When you really need to get close to the metal with your instrumentation then eBPF can be the way to go. Getting started can be a bit daunting but the people at Isovalent are offering a free e-book to help you on your way (sign up may be required):

How DevOps Teams Can Use Observability - The New Stack

Cloud Native can be a bit of an elastic term. In this eBook from The New Stack it is largely synonymous with Kubernetes. This is a useful guide, aimed mostly at devs who are new to the topic. It does, however, include some useful coverage of the non-trivial topic of logging in K8S. It also makes the interesting claim that AIOps is as essential tool for monitoring dynamic environments.

Community

If you would like to publicise an Observability-related meetup/standup etc then please let us know and we will list it here.

Dapr community meetup

Dapr is a multi-platform open source abstraction layer with built-in OpenTelemetry support. Join in here (top hat and tie are not required). The Dapr community meetup takes place every second Wednesday at 9am PST. The next two meetings are September 20th and october 4th. You can find full details here at https://github.com/dapr/community#community-meetings

OpenTelemetry community meetup

Even if you are not a Contributor it is a great opportunity to get up to speed with the project that is writing the rules for Observability. There are monthly meetups across three geographical meetings. October’s meetings are:

EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa): Oct 17, 11AM GMT (Zoom link)

APAC (Asia Pacific): Oct 18, 11AM India ST register to get the Zoom link

AMER (Americas): October 19, 9AM PST (Zoom link)