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.

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.

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.

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.

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.