An eye on Observability for August

A topic this newsletter revisits regularly is OpenTelemetry and how it might… hopefully… become a stable and universally accepted standard for observability metrics. We’re not there yet, but if you still have questions about the intentions and reasons behind the effort, then our very own April Yep, wrote an “explain it like i’m five” style post to get you up to speed.

Going off on an interesting tangent, John Pruitt from Timescale recently ran a workshop on how to analyze OpenTelemetry data with SQL. Which brings to mind something of a meeting of the old and new worlds of data formats, but in all honesty is an incredibly useful task.

If you want to get involved with the teams and people that are shaping the future of OpenTelemetry, and other Observability-related standards, then sign up for Open Observability day in Detroit and get your voice heard.

We talk a lot about taking control of observability data, and making it work for you in terms of cost and meaning. A recent episode of the Open Observability podcast covered the same topic and if you’re interested in knowing how some of the calculations behind metrics might influence this cost, read this post from Dejanu Alex.

I have a RaspberryPi at home that does a variety of tasks and a few weeks ago it suddenly stopped working. Oh, how I wish I had better monitoring for it than a sea of nonsensical log files… Maybe I should have read Oliver’s post on using Prometheus to keep an eye on things. Next time!