About ING Reliability Event This event is an internal event at ING. The conferences was held in Amsterdam and online. In total there were 900 attendees (300 physical and 600 online) Program the Reliability Event after the break My talk in Hall 4: Insights based on traces Relibility Event program Photos ‹ ›

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.

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.

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.

For OpenValue I created the content of a training and gave this training. See Mastering Application Insights training for details.

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.

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.