Cees Bos

My gists about Observability

Observability enthusiast and Grafana Champion, always looking for ways to improve software with better observability and what new insights can be gained. Delivering reliable software is always my priority. Combining existing tools often results in new ways to get an even better view. I work for OpenValue as a software engineer and SRE.
    @github @mastodon @rss Grafana Champions information
    • The power of observability 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. For example, suppose you have a load balancer failure that prevents traffic from reaching your application. A check with Checkly will fail and you will see a dip in your application metrics.

      Wed, 04 Sep 2024 21:22:41 +0100 Grafana Prometheus Checkly OpenTelemetry
    • Updates from Checkly Based on my previous post I have been in contact with Checkly about two parts that were not working as expected. I have some updates on these topics today. Sending traces from Checkly to Tempo In the previous post I mentioned that the traces in my Grafana environment showed root span not yet received. The root span was not available. This requires Checkly to send these spans to my environment as well.

      Fri, 30 Aug 2024 20:56:40 +0100 Grafana Tempo Checkly OpenTelemetry
    • Checkly This week I came across Checkly, a code-first synthetic monitoring solution that can do API checks and browser checks using PlayWright. It would have saved me a lot of time if this had been around 8 years ago. At that time I was working on a project where we were doing some external checks with a vendor like Checkly, but it was all manual configuration in a web interface. And internally we had a checker tool running that did all sorts of internal checks, both HTTP checks and database checks.

      Wed, 21 Aug 2024 21:10:40 +0100 Grafana Tempo Checkly OpenTelemetry
    • An announcement was made at GrafanaCON. Alloy is introduced in the family of Grafana tools. Alloy is an open source distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector, but is will also replace Promtail. In the Observability Toolkit I use both Promtail and OpenTelemetry Collector, so it makes sense to merge them. In this blog post I will replace Promtail with Alloy. In another post I will see how replacing of OpenTelemetry Collector with Alloy will look like.

      Sat, 13 Apr 2024 13:45:40 +0100 Observability Toolkit Grafana Loki Promtail Alloy
    • 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.

      Sat, 02 Mar 2024 16:42:44 +0100 Grafana Scenes
    • 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.

      Fri, 26 Jan 2024 15:40:23 +0100 Observability Toolkit Grafana Loki Tempo Prometheus
    • One of the great things about OpenTelemetry is the standardisation of span attributes and resource attributes. An example of this is deployment.environment. Attribute Type Description Examples Requirement Level deployment.environment string Name of the deployment environment (aka deployment tier). staging; production Recommended Source: https://opentelemetry.io/docs/specs/semconv/resource/deployment-environment/ With Grafana Faro you can configure the environment, as I explained in my blog post about the setup of Grafana Faro. This adds environment to the setup. In my technical deep dive blog post I explained that the data is sent as logs and as traces.

      Mon, 08 Jan 2024 20:10:00 +0100 OpenTelemetry Grafana Faro Tempo Hugo
    • With Grafana Scenes it is possible to create more than just dashboards. There are options to create dashboards that guide the user. Deep dives with drill down pages can help to analyse problems. And with a feature like time range comparison it is even possible to use a feature that is not available with normal dashboards. But how do you start developing with Grafana Scenes? One trend is to develop remotely, rather than on your local machine.

      Fri, 15 Dec 2023 21:45:00 +0100 Grafana Scenes Codespaces
    • As shown in my previous post you can add Grafana Faro to get more information about users who visit a website, in my case my own blog. This is how that setup looks like: But what kind of data is available now? Data sent by the browser The libraries from the Web SDK collect technical details about the browser interaction. The goal is not to track users, but to collect all sorts of technical data to see if there are problems with the web pages and what the perceived performance is for the users.

      Mon, 04 Dec 2023 22:06:00 +0100 Grafana Faro Loki Tempo
    • If you use Hugo to create a blog or website, as I do, and you use GitHub Pages to host the blog, it’s hard to get observability signals in your usual observability stack. I have been using Grafana, Loki, Tempo and Prometheus for a long time, so using this stack makes sense to me. You can use Google Analytics with Hugo, but I don’t like third party cookies. If you search for Google Analytics' and GDPR’ you will find quite a few articles about the concerns that exist on this topic.

      Fri, 24 Nov 2023 20:30:23 +0100 OpenTelemetry Grafana Faro Loki Tempo
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