Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

This is a writeup of the talk I gave at PromCon 2019. TSDB is the storage engine of Prometheus 2.x. Based on the Gorilla compression, it started out in an independent repo, which eventually attracted 60+ contributors and 771 stars. There were 500+ commits after the Prometheus 2.0 release. The repo was archived in August 2019, and now it’s a part of the Prometheus repo, inside the tsdb directory. Here are some highlights of the development over the past year.

Having completed a series of twelve Lighthouse Roadshow events across Europe and North America over the past six months, I’ve had time to reflect on what I’ve learnt about the rapid growth of the Kubernetes ecosystem, the importance of community and my personal development.

Holiday shopping is in full swing and cybercriminals are preparing their campaigns to maximise their profits this season. Here’s the latest news on Magecart and other website attacks, with insights from our own Security Researcher!

The holiday season is always a good time to slow down, meditate, and be grateful for family, friends, and the blessings you have in your life. And believe it or not, I think this is a good practice to do in IT as well. You’re fighting the good fight day after day, extinguishing fires, battling resource and budget constraints, and dealing with more than enough on your Christmas dinner plate.

The American magazine “Fortune” specializes in global banking, business and finance… What does it have to do with monitoring? Well, in one of its annual lists, the Fortune 100 (the largest companies on the planet), 92 companies use Splunk software… If we compare by volume of money, yes, Splunk would be the best software and that’s where this article would end.

So you want to install Elastic Cloud Enterprise (you know, the orchestration solution for the Elastic Stack that simplifies and standardizes how you deploy, upgrade, resize, configure, and monitor one to many clusters from a single UI/API) Installing ECE on one host isn’t tough. Installing it on two isn’t much harder. However, when you start dealing with 3, 5, 7, 11, etc., the complexity grows, as does the work involved in operating and maintaining (upgrading!) it all.

Within Elastic, the information security team is tasked with security detection and analytics, among many other activities of a typical information security team. To find abnormal and malicious behavior within our environment we leverage Elastic SIEM for investigations and threat hunting. When we find a pattern of behavior we want to be alerted on during an investigation or hunt we take the request JSON behind our investigation and put in to Watcher for alerting.

Smart Alerting is not enough. Effective deployment of AIOps requires an independent platform capable of interacting with all technologies along the path from signal to response.

As our application scales and many services are accessing a multitude of data points for each workload needed, it is difficult to ensure each part of the system has the right set of data access permissions. In today’s world, one of the worse nightmares of a software business is data leaking and data privacy issues. Not only it affects the brand reputation, but could also expose the company to heavy fines and other regulatory sanctions.

Cold Starts have been a massive issue with FaaS. In summary, it makes functions slower to startup in some cases. That’s in the opposite way of every effort to improve web applications performance. Many efforts have been made in the recent years to solve AWS Lambda cold starts or educate on handling them. Many have mitigated the issue, but none really solved it. AWS has just made a great progress on the area with the Provisioned Capacity feature announcement.