The first of the Application Observability Code Challenges is now available. A simple Spring Boot application with a REST endpoint implemented in Jersey/JAX-RS This application has some unexpected behaviour. Can you find out what is happening based on the observability data? Can you improve the observability to prove that a fix really fixed the problems?

Application Observability Code Challenges are a way to challenge yourself to improve the observability of a sample application. Of course, this application has some surprises that you probably did not expect. These challenges will help you develop an observability mindset and become more familiar with your observability tools.

Your local development of a Grafana plugin or dashboard may lack representative data. Connecting to production data sources may be impossible, but there are other ways to connect. Read more to find out how to use Grafana as a proxy to access the data.

The power of observability becomes visible when you combine signals and put it all together. Checks performed by Checkly can provide a piece of the puzzle that gives you a better view of what is happening. It would be really nice if you could combine the data from Checkly in the same Grafana dashboards as your other observability data. This post describes how to bring it together and how to add Grafana annotations to your dashboard based on Checkly results.

Grafana Scenes can enhance your experience with Grafana dashboards by bringing observability data together and guiding users to the right data. Combining metrics, traces and logs helps to understand the actual behavior of a system. That is the goal of observability. If a dashboard or an app created with scenes does not give the right insights, then still the explore feature of Grafana is available to dive into all data available searching for the unknown-unknown.

Deep understanding of the actual behavior of a system is key for me. I like to know all the details because it helps me to see the whole picture. I am visually oriented, so tools like Grafana really help me in these situations. Observability is a topic that has come up in the last few years, but I have actually been doing this for years. But the good thing is that it is more standardized now.