An eye on observability for January 2022

Surely you couldn’t possibly want more than this fine monthly(ish) newsletter? But if it’s not enough for you, there are two new resources worth adding to your regular viewing list.

Did you know that Twitter added a communities feature? 🤔 Yup! And there’s already an observability one. If you’re interested in semi-real time discussions, jump in and get active.

One of the members of that community and a Developer evangelist for GitLab, Michael Friedrich began a fantastic resource for newcomers to Observability O11y.love. If you’re not new to the community, then contribute your favorite resources to the growing list.

Visualizing observability data so people can make sense of, and act on it, is an important but often misunderstood task. Charles Mahler of InfluxData published an excellent post on dashboard design best practices, which places making them useful for users first and foremost.

This newsletter has covered the fascinating potential of eBPF on numerous occasions before, but it can be a complex technology to start with and know how to leverage.

Nate Matherson put together (last year, whoops…) a practical introduction to the technology, including its history and how it works.

Several levels up the stack, the talented team at solo.io created Bumblebee that aims to make the process of creating applications that leverage eBPF quicker and less boilerplate-dependent. If you’re interested in reading more of the story behind the creation of Bumblebee, then this post on ZDNet gets you started.

Released late in 2021, the new Prometheus agent mode continues to make long-term Prometheus users happy. If you’re interested in knowing how it might be useful to you or your teams, then read this summary post from Alex Vazquez of TIBCO about how it has helped him optimize workloads.

It’s that time of the year when industry thinkers and analysts make predictions for what the next (just under) 12 months will bring. Chronosphere’s own Martin Mao summarized his thoughts. They include widespread adoption of OpenTelemetry, central observability teams becoming the norm, and more. What are your predictions for 2022? Let us know on twitter.

Serverless and Kubernetes have never sat completely neatly with each other until Knative emerged to offer convenient serverless payload management. While busy working on version 1.1, the project also applied for Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) incubation status, implying that the project is ready for widespread early adoption. Version 1.1 includes new features for defining minimum scaling values and a wider range of names for pod custom metrics.

There will be more to come after January, so stay tuned to our blog and the next (February) edition of Eye on Observability.