Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

OpenTelemetry offers powerful data collection, but maximizing its efficiency requires careful configuration. This article explores advanced techniques for sampling filtering, and data enrichment.

While retrospectives provide a valuable pathway for learning outside of the flow of work, we also want learning to happen during an incident or unexpected event as it unfolds. This can be challenging due to the negative impact of stress on our ability to learn and navigate difficult situations. In this article, we’ll dig into how stress inhibits our ability to learn and what we can do about it.

For better or worse, most companies—including their execs and developers—see SREs as superheroes who’ll save them from the evils of downtime and service degradation with their boundless superpowers. SREs are expected to constantly perform dangerous stunts like production debugging or communicating highly technical issues to angry VPs. They must also be able to manage infrastructure, networks, databases, pipelines, operating systems and much more.

Pets.com was an online pet supply retailer founded in 1998, during the dot-com craze. In February 2000, it raised $83 million to go public based mainly on metrics like user acquisition, website traffic, and brand recognition. However, the profit margins were minimal and the marketing costs exorbitant, which led Pets.com to file for bankruptcy nine months after its IPO. The industry now recognizes these metrics as vanity metrics.

Why should you monitor your third-party Cloud and SaaS vendors if you are in SRE/Ops? As part of an SRE team, your primary responsibility is ensuring the reliability of your applications. What makes you responsible for monitoring services that you don't even manage? Third-party services are just like yours - with SLAs. And outages happen, affecting you as well as many others who depend on them.

What if your have already implemented tracing but lacks robust metrics capabilities? Enter SpanConnector: a tool that bridges this gap by converting trace data into actionable metrics. This post details the workings of SpanConnector, providing a guide on its configuration and implementation.