Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

January 2023

Bad Observability

Observability has become a bit of a buzzword in the industry for the last few years. Exactly what "observability" means depends on who you ask, but most people would agree its about both: There's plenty of content out there telling you how to implement observability, or what good looks like. But what about bad observability? What are some anti-patterns to watch out for?

Grafana vs. Power BI vs SquaredUp

You’re part of a data-driven engineering team. You have a rich, complex, and dynamic set of tools but you’re struggling to discover and share insights from all that data. So, you're looking for a platform that will help unify it all. Naturally, you want to compare Grafana vs. Power BI - the big names. Plus, there's a new player on the block - SquaredUp.

SRE Trends from AWS re:Invent 2022

In November/December 2022 I attended AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. It was certainly an experience for this small town kid from New Zealand, and one that I took a lot away from. While I was at the conference, I took the time to walk around and take notes. In this article I will share the trends that I observed which I think will have an impact on SRE work in 2023 and beyond, including: ...and others.

Dashboard Fridays: Sample Kubernetes dashboard

Engineers need to understand the status of microservices run on EKS, like health status of clusters and nodes, to avoid issues impacting business critical microservices. Plus, you need to be able to keep an eye on EKS resources, including whether the Kubernetes cluster has auto-scaled (where enabled). Usually, to view these metrics, it requires looking at each EKS cluster and node group individually in the AWS Console, or via another complex third-party dashboarding tool. The data is siloed and difficult to consolidate.

Dashboard Fridays: Sample Azure Monitor Dashboard

These Azure dashboards built in SquaredUp show some of the capabilities of SquaredUp’s Azure plugin. SquaredUp lets you easily create dashboards for your Azure resources, scoping a new tile with just a few clicks. The Azure plugin provides the ability to show metrics, alerts, and cost, as well leverage KQL queries against Application AppInsights and Log Analytics workspaces - all from one plugin. When scoping a tile, you can also choose whether to group, aggregate, sort or filter the data.

Dashboard Fridays: Sample Kubernetes dashboard

Engineers need to understand the status of microservices run on EKS, like health status of clusters and nodes, to avoid issues impacting business critical microservices. Plus, you need to be able to keep an eye on EKS resources, including whether the Kubernetes cluster has auto-scaled (where enabled). Usually, to view these metrics, it requires looking at each EKS cluster and node group individually in the AWS Console, or via another complex third-party dashboarding tool. The data is siloed and difficult to consolidate.

New Year's (observability) Resolutions

A new year has started and I've been pondering my hopes and dreams for the year to come. In the world of SRE, observability is the most prominent pillar of my work. So, I decided to drill into the topic of observability and what I'd like to see happen in the industry in 2023. Rather than focusing on any tool, technology, or methodology, I'lll be exploring concepts that can be broadly applied in any organization.