2024-01-29
Shopify’s blueprint
Scaling Platform Engineering: Shopify’s Blueprint is another great OpenObservability Talks episode where host Dotan Horovits and Aparna Subramanian (Director of Production Engineering at Shopify) discuss, amongst other things, the shared responsibility model between application developers and platform engineers in the context of observability.
Modernizing o11y platforms
In Modernizing Observability Platforms Sameer Paradkar motivates the need for modernization, reviews trends, and provides some suggestions concerning building these platforms.
OTel for Ruby on Rails
Michal Kazmierczak presents a demo of an instrumented Rails app with a self-hosted OSS observability stack. Check out Self-hosted observability stack for Ruby on Rails apps and thanks for sharing!
Instrumentation 101
What is instrumentation for observability? by the one and only Austin Parker is a really useful piece, explaining different instrumentaiton strategies and providing guidance.
Optimizing observability
Check out Optimizing Observability with OpenTelemetry Collector, a 23 min video of the Conf42 DevOps 2024 talk by Bruno Ferreira, including tail sampling coverage.
Books
With observability going mainstream there is an increasing number of books available and this week I'd like to call out two books:
- Fluent Bit with Kubernetes by Phil Wilkins is an excellent resource, both for learning as well as a reference, covering everything you need to know from configuration to extending this popular agent. At time of writing the first 5 chapters are available.
- Observability with Grafana by Rob Chapman and Peter Holmes is a hands-on deep dive on the Grafana stack, covering logs, metrics, traces, and profiles as well as operational topics.
That was it for this edition of the o11y newsletter. Feel free to share news items with me via Twitter—DMs are open if you like to share something in private. Stay safe and hope to see you around next week!