O11y Guide - Without Observability It's Just Code

Welcome to another chapter in the ongoing series I started covering my journey into the world of cloud native observability. 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 time sharing who the observability players are, looked at the ongoing discussion around monitoring pillars versus phases,  and shared thoughts on architectural level choices being made, and shared the open standards available within the open source landscape. I continued onwards with a few of the architectural challenges you might encounter when older monolithic applications and monitoring tools are still part of an organization's infrastructure landscape. Finally, I walked you through the open source visualization and dashboard project called Perses by introducing my hands-on workshop.

Being a developer from my early days in IT, it's been very interesting to explore the complexities of cloud native o11y. Monitoring applications goes way beyond just writing and deploying code, especially in the cloud native world. One thing remains the same, maintaining your organization's architecture always requires that you understand that without observability, it's just code you are deploying.

Let's look at what makes cloud native observability so crucial to your organization's success.

O11y Architecture - Financial Payments Example

Cloud native technology has been changing the way payment services are architected. In 2020 I presented a series with insights from real implementations adopting open source and cloud native technology to modernize payment services. 

The series consisted of six articles and covered architectural diagrams from logical, schematic, to detailed views of the various  use cases uncovered. 

The architectures presented were based on open source cloud native technologies, such as containers, microservices, and a Kubernetes based container platform. The major omission in this series was to avoid discussing any aspect of cloud native observability. This series will take a look at fixing that omission with an open source standards based cloud native observability platform that helps DevOps teams control the speed, scale, and complexity of a cloud native world for their financial payments architecture.

The part one introduction covered the baseline architecture, defined the payments project, and shared the planning for this series in adding observability to the logical and physical architectures. Part two explored the common architectural elements needed when adding cloud native observability to your financial payments solutions. In this article we'll walk through a financial payments physical architecture, exploring how to add scalable cloud native observability and laying out the various deployment options you have for your payments observability solution.

Getting Started with Prometheus - Relabeling Metrics in Prometheus

Are you looking to get away from proprietary instrumentation? 

Are you interested in open source observability but lack the knowledge to just dive right in? 

This workshop is for you, designed to expand your knowledge and understanding of open source observability tooling that is available to you today.

Dive right into a free, online, self paced, hands-on workshop introducing you to Prometheus. Prometheus is an open source systems monitoring and alerting tool kit that enables you to hit the ground running with discovering, collecting, and querying your observability today. Over the course of this workshop you will learn what Prometheus is, what it is not, install it, start collecting metrics, and learn all the things you need to know to become effective at running Prometheus in your observability stack. 

Previously, I shared an introduction to Prometheus, installing Prometheus, an introduction to the query language, exploring basic queries, and using advanced queries as free online worksop labs. In this article you'll continue your journey with relabeling metrics in Prometheus.

Open Source Edinburgh Meetup - Getting Started with Prometheus Workshop (video)

Last month I was in Edinburgh speaking at the Open Source Edinburgh Meetup about how to get started with Prometheus.

I shared my getting started with Prometheus workshop, which I've been working on for months now, and with a good turnout this group was perfect to test how the workshop lands with new observability engineers.

We were in the offices of Scott Logic (just down the hill from Edinburgh Castle) and below you'll find the agenda, the abstract, and the video recording of my session.

O11y Architecture - Financial Payments Common Observability Elements

Cloud native technology has been changing the way payment services are architected. In 2020 I presented a series with insights from real implementations adopting open source and cloud native technology to modernize payment services. 

The series consisted of six articles and covered architectural diagrams from logical, schematic, to detailed views of the various  use cases uncovered. 

The architectures presented were based on open source cloud native technologies, such as containers, microservices, and a Kubernetes based container platform. The major omission in this series was to avoid discussing any aspect of cloud native observability. This series will take a look at fixing that omission with an open source standards based cloud native observability platform that helps DevOps teams control the speed, scale, and complexity of a cloud native world for their financial payments architecture.

The part one introduction covered the baseline architecture, defined the payments project, and shared the planning for this series in adding observability to the logical and physical architectures. In this article we'll explore the logical diagram that captures the elements of a successful payments solution.