A Guide to Effective Dashboard Design — The previous posts were about Phantom Metrics and Expensive Metrics. On this post we’ll look at Unreadable Metrics and how to design effective dashboards. Dashboards are powerful tools for monitoring and troubleshooting your system. Too often, however, we run into an incident, jump to the dashboard, just to find ourselves…

The previous post was about Phantom Metrics: Why Your Monitoring Dashboard May Be Lying to You. On this post we’ll look at Expensive Metrics and how our bill quickly gets out of control. We all collect logs, metrics, traces, and possibly other telemetry data. Yet, this can get expensive pretty…

TL;DR Key updates: Prometheus Agent for lightweight scrape-and-forward to external backends Many new Service Discovery mechanisms, also without a sidecar Native Histrograms and Examplars support in the database PromLens query builder tool is now part of Prometheus PromQL new functions (e.g. sign, trigo.), negative offset support Prometheus UI move to React, query auto-completion…

Whether you’re a DevOps, SRE, or just a data driven individual, you’re probably addicted to dashboards and metrics. We look at our metrics to see how our system is doing, whether on the infrastructure, the application or the business level. We trust our metrics to show us the status of…

Microservices architecture is the new norm for building products these days. An application made up of hundreds of independent services enables teams to work independently and accelerate development. However, such highly distributed applications are also harder to monitor. When hundreds of services are traversed to satisfy a single request, it…

Everyone’s talking about Platform Engineering these days. Even Gartner recently featured it in its Hype Cycle for Software Engineering 2022. But what is Platform Engineering really about? Is it the next stage in the evolution of DevOps? Is it just a fancy rebrand for DevOps or SRE? As a veteran…

Everyone in the software industry is in a race to become more agile. We all want to improve the performance of our software development lifecycle (SDLC). But how do you actually do that? If you want to improve your performance, first determine what KPI you’d like to improve. DORA metrics…

In our data driven world, everything is an API. Most of these APIs are RESTful APIs, running atop the good-old HTTP protocol. Funny enough, however, the protocol hasn’t changed all that much to adapt to our data driven world. HTTP was originally built for fetching resources for web page rendering…

We’ve all grown used to logs, metrics and traces serving as the “three pillars of observability.” And indeed they are very important telemetry signals. But are they indeed the sum of the observability game? Not at all. …