Steve Waterworth

Finding And Fixing Common Kubernetes Problems

Kubernetes does a fantastic job of running and scaling application workloads. However, it can be tricky to find the source of problems when things don't go as planned.

Monitoring RabbitMQ with Prometheus

RabbitMQ is the messaging heart of many applications. Learn how to monitor its vital signs with Prometheus.

OpenTelemetry

Avoiding The 20 Dashboard Tabs Problem

"My mind is like my browser. It has too many tabs open, some of them are frozen and I don't know where the music is coming from" - Exhausted SRE trying to resolve an incident.

Getting Started

Automatic Discovery of Application Topology

Asserts automatically analyses metric and trace metadata to build a graph database of application component relationships over time. This information is used to collate all affected application components onto a single dynamic dashboard when an incident occurs.

Monitoring Python Using Prometheus

According to the Tiobe programming language popularity index, Python is number one and continuing to gain in popularity. For observability Prometheus has become the de facto standard for open source, with 1B+ pulls from Docker Hub and nearly 50k stars on GitHub. Many other open source projects include a Prometheus

OpenTelemetry

Observability - Build vs Buy

The requirement to observe and monitor modern distributed applications is no longer in question. The question is how to acquire that capability, build it or buy it?

Getting Started

One Dashboard To Rule Them All

Integrating open source observability tooling to form a seamless platform was previously challenging. Asserts just made it easy.

Tracing

Substantially Reduce Observability Costs with Asserts Data Distiller

Observability produces a lot of data which consumes compute and storage resources with their associated costs. Asserts Data Distiller observes everything only retaining what matters, significantly reducing costs.

Freemium

Announcing Asserts Freemium Edition

Asserts announces the free forever version. Yes that's right you can run Asserts on your own Kubernetes cluster for free, forever.

Prometheus

How to control costs of your Observability stack

Observability is mandatory but really expensive. Commercial tools provide convenience at a price. Open source tools are now mature enough to challenge those commercial offerings and provide considerable savings.

Prometheus

Prometheus Exporters and Libraries

Expanding Prometheus coverage of your applications is easy. Exporters can be added with just minor configuration changes. Adding client libraries for code coverage is just a few lines.

Prometheus

Prometheus - Getting data in is easy, getting value out is tough

With the minimal effort of a day, a Prometheus server can be up, running, and collecting data. However, as many soon find out this is but the first step of a very long and never-ending journey.

SLOs

Keep Your Applications SAAFE with Asserts

Asserts is built around the best practices laid out in the SRE Handbook and uses SAAFE for its assertion categories extending the Golden Signals described in the handbook. Traditionally Golden Signals have used the Rate, Errors and Duration (RED) or Utilisation, Saturation and Errors (USE) methodologies. The SAAFE methodology embraces

Tracing

Tracing is on Trial

Tracing is just structured logging at DEBUG level. Would you run logging at DEBUG in production? No!

Prometheus

An Introduction to Prometheus

Over the years it has become the de facto standard for time series metrics across the CNCF Landscape, with many projects providing a Prometheus metrics endpoint as standard.

Root Cause Analysis

Speed up RCA by Going SLO

Once you stop fretting over each individual service, you should change your monitoring strategy accordingly. Your primary consideration becomes making sure your application is processing requests in a prompt and error free manner.