Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

There are plenty of good SRE/Ops related podcasts out there. I follow a few of them and listen to episodes whose titles sound interesting. The problem with podcasts is that some episodes focus on one topic, and other episodes deal with a host of topics. In between there is filler and things that are not relevant to the topic but are necessary to carry on a conversation. Spending 30-60 minutes listening to podcasts is not always a great use of time.

Continuing our series on setting up Prometheus in a container, this article provides a step-by-step guide for how to configure alerts in Prometheus. We will add alerting rules and deploy Prometheus Alertmanager with Slack integration. If you follow the steps in this article, you will end up with a containerized setup for: Let's get started.

There are different ways you can use to deploy the Prometheus monitoring tool in your environment. One of the fastest ways to get started is to deploy it as a Docker container. This guide shows you how to quickly set up a minimal Prometheus on your laptop. You can then extend that setup to add a monitoring dashboard, alerting, and authentication.

This article is an attempt to list the best incident management material and guides available for free on the internet. If I've missed something you think should be here, do let me know and I'll be happy to add it.

The Prometheus monitoring tool can store its metrics either locally or remotely. You can configure a remote data store using the remote_write configuration. This article describes the various data store options available as well as how to set up a remote store.

Service discovery (SD) is a mechanism by which the Prometheus monitoring tool can discover monitorable targets automatically. Instead of listing down each and every target to be scraped in the Prometheus configuration, service discovery acts as a source of targets that Prometheus can query at runtime. Service discovery becomes crucial when there are dynamically changing hosts, especially in microservices architectures and environments like Kubernetes.

Runbooks are a key part of incident management and preserve institutional knowledge. They can be used for both incident response as well as routine tasks like db maintenance and generating a complex report. We are mostly focused on incident response runbooks here.

Incident management tools are important for organizations to effectively handle service outages. With so many incident management tools around with different feature sets, it's often difficult to find the one that is right for your needs. In this article, we attempt to make a list of incident management software available in 2024 with their features to help you arrive at the right one.

Why is Slack becoming so popular in incident management? Slack is one of the most popular communication tools used in companies. If you're part of a remote team, your team is probably on Slack or something similar like MS Teams. Although IM tools lack the communication nuances that are taken for granted in face to face interactions, they provide many other advantages.

Maintaining transparent communication about service availability is crucial for businesses of all sizes. Status pages are an important part of your communication strategy during times of outages and maintenance events. You can choose to go with a fully managed status page provider, or host an open-source one yourself. Open source status page providers offer a cost-effective and customizable solution. However, then can come with their own drawbacks.