The latest News and Information on Monitoring for Websites, Applications, APIs, Infrastructure, and other technologies.
As organizations are adopting more of the FinOps foundation practices and trying to optimize their cloud-computing costs, engineering plays an imperative role in that maturity. Traditional troubleshooting of applications nowadays relies heavily on static logs and legacy telemetry that developers added either when first writing their applications, or whenever they run a troubleshooting session where they lack telemetry and need to add more logs in an ad-hoc fashion.
We’ve all been in the situation before: it’s Friday at 5 PM and the only on-call engineer available to handle incidents is about to hit the slopes. Unfortunately, at that very moment, a customer reports to support that they are unable to access the company’s ecommerce website to complete a purchase. Internal monitoring systems seem quiet and services appear available on internal health dashboards.
By kickstarting a monitoring project with Prometheus, you might realize that you get an initial set of out-of-the-box metrics with just Node Exporter and Kube State Metrics. But, this will only get you so far since you will just be performing black box monitoring. How can you go to the next level and observe what’s beyond? They are an essential part of the day-to-day monitoring of cloud-native systems, as they provide an additional dimension to the business and app level.
It’s the year 2009, a nice weekend in late spring and a small group of monitoring enthusiasts comes together to discuss how to move forward with the idea of forking Nagios. The Icinga team in 2009, just to set the mood. Plans were made to make it faster, easier, more scalable, and simply better. Of course, such a project has a lot of hurdles to take – the most important one was of course: the name.
Distributed tracing enables you to monitor and observe requests as they flow through your distributed systems to understand whether these requests are behaving properly. You can compare tiny differences between multiple traces coming through your microservices-based applications every day to pinpoint areas that are affecting performance. As a result, debugging and troubleshooting are simpler and faster.
As the world’s leading local delivery platform, Delivery Hero brings groceries and household goods to customers in more than 70 countries. Their technology stack comprises over 200 services across 20 Kubernetes clusters running on Amazon EKS. This cloud-based, containerized infrastructure enabled them to scale their operation to support increasing demand as the volume of orders placed on their platform doubled during the pandemic.
Blocked queries are one of the key issues faced by database analysts, engineers, and anyone managing database performance at scale. Blocking can be caused by inefficient query or database design as well as resource saturation, and can lead to increased latency, errors, and user frustration. Pinpointing root blockers—the underlying problematic queries that set off cascading locks on database resources—is key to troubleshooting and remediating database performance issues.
