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.

In this blog post, I would like to share with you some of the projects that I used to to get a better sense of what Prometheus can do. I am a very hands-on type of learner, and usually when I want to explore new technologies, I start with “hello world” apps and small toy projects. Therefore, the main goal of this blog is to share with you how easily you can set up Prometheus and how quickly you can create simple projects that can be monitored with Prometheus and visualized in Grafana.

Microservices have been gaining popularity since they were introduced in 2015. But they come with challenges for both developers and users because of the intricate configuration and deployment which often leave developers longing for the simplicity of monolithic applications.

In this KubeCon + CloudNativeCon session last month, Grafana Labs Software Engineer Goutham Veeramachaneni offered a deep dive into how to make sure your Cortex will scale with your usage.

Whether you sat out this KubeCon or were too busy working the hallway track to make it to all the sessions on your list, never fear. You can catch up on all the talks given by Grafanistas here.

“SLO is a favorite word of SREs,” Björn “Beorn” Rabenstein said during his talk at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in San Diego last week. “Of course, it’s also great for design decisions, to set the right goals, and to set alerting in the right way.

Joe Elliott, a backend engineer at Grafana Labs, took the stage in front of a packed house at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in San Diego to demonstrate a few of the tricks he uses to debug applications live in Kubernetes. The goal is to increase your knowledge of applications in the production environment. Elliott’s techniques are framework agnostic and Linux-specific, and they are most useful in situations where you have a known type of problem and application.

The Grafana 6.5 stable release includes improvements to CloudWatch, Explore, Templating, Azure Monitor, Graphite, Docker, Provisioning, Auth Proxy, OAuth, and much more.

At the Grafana Labs booth at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in San Diego this week, we showed a demo of a future feature for Grafana: distributed tracing datasources. Until now, Grafana has been bringing together metrics and logs, to be viewed side-by-side on one screen. Now we’re adding tracing, which has been a missing puzzle piece for even more observability in Grafana.

This blog post is a writeup of the presentation Bartek Plotka and I gave at PromCon 2019. Cortex is a horizontally scalable, clustered Prometheus implementation aimed at giving users a global view of all their Prometheus metrics in one place, and providing long term storage for those metrics. Thanos is newer project aimed at solving the same challenges. In this blog post, we compare these two projects and see how it is possible to have two completely different approaches to the same problems.