Eric D. Schabell: February 2023

Monday, February 27, 2023

O11y Guide - Building Advanced++ Dashboards

The ongoing series covering my journey into the world of cloud native observability continues in this article, where I'm continuing to explore an open source dashboard and visualization project. If you missed any of the previous articles, head on back to the introduction for a quick update.

After laying out the groundwork for this series in the initial article, I spent some time in the second article sharing who the observability players are. I also discussed the teams that these players are on in this world of cloud native o11y. For the third article I looked at the ongoing discussion around monitoring pillars versus phases. In the fourth article I talked about keeping your options open with open source standards. My last installment, the fifth article in this series, I talked about bringing monolithic applications into the cloud native o11y world. In my sixth article, I provided you with an introduction to a new open source dashboard and visualization project and shared how to install the project on your local developer machine. The seventh article I explored the API and tooling provided by the Perses project. Then I spent time in an article  covering the open dashboard specification that you need to follow and then you started creating your first dashboard. Finally, in the previous article, you expanded your dashboard with a few charts, gauges, and rows.

In this article you'll complete the workshop and add a few advanced components to your dashboard.

Thursday, February 23, 2023

Uptime Community - When does Kubernetes make sense?

On Tuesday, February 28th at 19:00 hours CET, 13:00 East Coast, and 10:00 West Coast I'm going to be at the Uptime community event titled, When does K8s make sense? 

As the event page states, it's going to be a lot of fun with four experts debating on the topic of 'When Does Kubernetes Make Sense?'. 

The panel will work its way through three main questions:

  1. When does Kubernetes make sense? Which situations have they personally seen?
  2. How is this changing? What has to change in tools, management or core K8s?
  3. How does it impact engineers? What skills are most helpful - and most overlooked?

Questions from the audience will be embedded into the discussion by the moderator.

Monday, February 20, 2023

O11y Guide - Building Advanced Dashboard

The ongoing series covering my journey into the world of cloud native observability continues in this article, where I'm continuing to explore an open source dashboard and visualization project. If you missed any of the previous articles, head on back to the introduction for a quick update.

After laying out the groundwork for this series in the initial article, I spent some time in the second article sharing who the observability players are. I also discussed the teams that these players are on in this world of cloud native o11y. For the third article I looked at the ongoing discussion around monitoring pillars versus phases. In the fourth article I talked about keeping your options open with open source standards. My last installment, the fifth article in this series, I talked about bringing monolithic applications into the cloud native o11y world. In my sixth article, I provided you with an introduction to a new open source dashboard and visualization project and shared how to install the project on your local developer machine. The seventh article I explored the API and tooling provided by the Perses project. Then I spent time in an article  covering the open dashboard specification that you need to follow to start creating your first dashboard. Finally, in the previous article, you built your very first dashboard.

In this article you'll flush out that first dashboard completing two rows of charts, gauges, and other components visualizing the performance of the target instance.

Wednesday, February 15, 2023

Cloud Native + k8S Edinburgh Meetup - 3 Pitfalls Everyone Should Avoid with Cloud Data (slides)

 Tonight I was in Edinburgh for the Cloud Native + Kubernetes Edinburgh meetup. With over 650 members, this group was a perfect venue for my talk about cloud native and the struggles we are having with all of the data it generates.

These insights on pitfalls everyone should avoid with cloud data are a constant work in progress as the entire cloud native world is moving so fast. It needs constant tending to further refine some of the improvements that have been worked into the story lately.

We met in the offices of Codebase (just down the hill from Edinburgh Castle) and the Cloud Native + Kubernetes Edinburgh and I wanted to share my slides as I promised.

Monday, February 13, 2023

O11y Guide - Building Your First Dashboard

In this installment of the series covering my journey into the world of cloud native observability, I'm continuing to explore an open source dashboard and visualization project. If you missed any of the previous articles, head on back to the introduction for a quick update.

After laying out the groundwork for this series in the initial article, I spent some time in the second article sharing who the observability players are. I also discussed the teams that these players are on in this world of cloud native o11y. For the third article I looked at the ongoing discussion around monitoring pillars versus phases. In the fourth article I talked about keeping your options open with open source standards. My last installment, the fifth article in this series, I talked about bringing monolithic applications into the cloud native o11y world. In my sixth article, I provided you with an introduction to a new open source dashboard and visualization project and shared how to install the project on your local developer machine. The seventh article I explored the API and tooling provided by the Perses project. Finally, in my previous article I covered the open dashboard specification that you need to follow to start creating your first dashboard.

In this article you'll start developing your very first dashboard!

Thursday, February 9, 2023

WTF is SRE 2023 - Telling Effective Tales About Production (accepted)

Good news this week. I'll be speaking at this new (for me) event called WTF is SRE 2023, to be hosted in London from 3-5 May 2023.

This is the fourth edition and they are putting on four tracks; Observability, Reliability, DevEx and DevSecOps. 

You must be asking the same thing I was when I got this invite to submit, what is WTF is SRE? Well they say, "It is a highly-rated, very-tweeted-about, ridiculously-fun, wildly-insightful two-day conference designed to improve the world of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)."

As you can tell from the tone and style, these have got to be some really fun people to hang out with for a few days, so I'm all in with the following submissions.

Monday, February 6, 2023

O11y Guide - Exploring Perses Dashboards

Getting started with Perses

In this eighth installment of the series covering my journey into the world of cloud native observability, I'm continuing to explore an open source project called Perses. If you missed any of the previous articles, head on back to the introduction for a quick update.

After laying out the groundwork for this series in the initial article, I spent some time in the second article sharing who the observability players are. I also discussed the teams that these players are on in this world of cloud native o11y. For the third article I looked at the ongoing discussion around monitoring pillars versus phases. In the fourth article I talked about keeping your options open with open source standards. My last installment, the fifth article in this series, I talked about bringing monolithic applications into the cloud native o11y world. In my sixth article, I provided you with an introduction to a new open source dashboard and visualization project and shared how to install the project on your local developer machine. The previous and seventh article I explored the API and tooling provided by the Perses project. 

In this eighth article I'm diving in to understanding what makes up a Perses dashboard. This is a preview of the fourth lab developed for my hands-on workshop dedicated to exploring dashboards and visualization.

Wednesday, February 1, 2023

Cloud Native + Kubernetes Edinburgh Meetup - 3 Pitfalls Everyone Should Avoid with Cloud Data

As fate would have it, not only am I going to be in Edinburgh for the first 2023 event for the Edinburgh Tech Meetup, but also in the second week for the Cloud Native + Kubernetes Edinburgh meetup.

With over 650 members, this group is spot on for the topic I'm presenting. These insights on pitfalls everyone should avoid with cloud data are a constant work in progress as the entire cloud native world is moving so fast. It needs constant tending to further refine some of the improvements that have been worked into the story lately.

On 15 February 2023 I'll be at the offices of Codebase (just down the hill from Edinburgh Castle) and the Cloud Native + Kubernetes Edinburgh meetup placed the following event announcement online.