The latest News and Information on Monitoring for Websites, Applications, APIs, Infrastructure, and other technologies.
The monitoring, tooling, and observability space is crowded. It’s hard to keep track of what most tools in this category originally set out to do— but if we had to guess… they were probably built to support monolithic architectures with complex systems, to give Ops and IT a way to minimize the impact of an outage.
At Grafana Labs we run a lot of distributed databases. These distributed databases all make use of a hash ring in order to evenly distribute workloads across replicas of certain components. For a more detailed description of the architecture of our projects, check out our Mimir architecture docs.
Customers expect that online services are available all the time. The truth is that outages happen to almost everyone because providing 100% service availability is challenging and costly. Creating reliable and profitable service is, amongst other things, finding the balance between application availability, costs and time to market. Faster feature delivery means less availability as constant changes to production may cause issues and introduce bugs.
Comprehensive observability starts with good instrumentation. OpenTelemetry, aka “OTel,” sets a unified standard, enabling you to instrument your applications once, then send that data to any backend observability tool of choice. OpenTelemetry’s standard for generating and ingesting telemetry data is slated to become as ubiquitous as current container orchestration standards. Because of this, development teams are increasingly adopting OpenTelemetry to their applications.
What is an observability engineer? Is it your SIEM admin? How about your application performance monitoring admin? Neither? Both? Observability engineering is more than administering a tool. There is more to it than data onboarding, writing parsers, and getting data in. As an observability tool admin, you work with data producers and consumers to get data in a human-readable and searchable format from the source to the analytics system.
