Enterprise applications rely on large amounts of data that needs to be distributed, processed, and stored. Data platforms offer data management services via a combination of open source and commercially supported software stacks. These services enable accelerated development and deployment of data-hungry business applications. Building a containerized data analytics platform comprising different software stacks comes with several deployment challenges.

In order to stay competitive, enterprise organizations are engaged in an ongoing drive to optimize and scale the delivery of their products and services. Data has become a critical solution component of achieving these goals.

The Prometheus Blackbox exporter allows endpoints exploration over several protocols, such as HTTP(S), DNS, TCP, and ICMP. This exporter generates multiple metrics on your configured targets, like general endpoint status, response time, redirect information, or certificate expiration dates. The Blackbox Exporter works out-of-the-box, as it just focuses on external visibility details. To get more detailed metrics, you can instrument your applications.

When we were moving an app to Kubernetes, we encountered a peculiar situation where other services running on Kubernetes started throwing a ThreadError from time to time, saying that a resource is unavailable. We started investigating, and it turned out that you want to know where your AppSignal error has occurred. A short reminder - Kubernetes works on two levels: So, you want to know which pod and which node ran a particular AppSignal transaction.

There was a big announcement this year at GrafanaCon 2021 that performance testing tool k6 is being aquired by Grafana Labs. It was really exciting news for folks who cheer for open source because these are two giant projects. At time of this writing, k6 has over 12K stars and Grafana with a respectable 42K stars on Github as well. In full transparency, I have used both of those repos many times over the years and am a fellow stargazer.