OpenObservability Talks Dotan Horovits

Many organizations struggle in understanding and monitoring the costs of their Kubernetes workloads, cloud infrastructure and cloud native applications. Moreover, different cloud providers use different conventions, which makes it difficult to compare across vendors and to monitor cost in multi-cloud environments. The lack of cost observability and vendor-agnostic FinOps standardization can become a critical business challenge.  

OpenCost is a vendor-neutral open source project for measuring and allocating infrastructure and container costs. It’s built for Kubernetes cost monitoring to power real-time cost monitoring, showback, and chargeback, across on-premises Kubernetes as well as cloud managed offering.  

I discussed this topic with Matt Ray, Senior Community Manager for the OpenCost project. Matt  has been active in Open Source and DevOps communities for over two decades and has spoken at and helped organize many conferences and meetups. He is currently the Senior Community Manager at Kubecost for the CNCF Sandbox Project OpenCost. Matt also co-hosts the Software Defined Talk podcast.

The episode was live-streamed on 14 February 2023 and the video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhqXQV2jsxo

OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube.

We live-stream the episodes on Twitch and YouTube Live - tune in to see us live, and chime in with your comments and questions on the live chat.
https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability
https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks

Have you got an interesting topic you'd like to share in an episode? Reach out to us and submit your proposal at https://openobservability.io/

Show Notes:


FinOps and the FinOps Foundation
Relevant stakeholders
Understanding your public cloud bill
How is Kubernetes spend different
OpenCost project overview
OpenCost roadmap and ecosystem
How to join OpenCost convo
News and updates

Resources:


https://www.cncf.io/blog/2022/12/06/opencost-a-new-cncf-sandbox-project-for-real-time-kubernetes-cost-monitoring/ 
https://www.opencost.io/
https://github.com/opencost/opencost 
https://logz.io/blog/finops-distributed-tracing/

Socials:


Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenObserv
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks
Website: https://openobservability.io/



Dotan Horovits

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Twitter: horovits

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/horovits/

Mastodon: @horovits@fosstodon



Matt Ray

===============

Twitter: mattray

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mhray/

Mastodon: @mattray@mastodon.social

A 3-node Kubernetes cluster with Prometheus will ship around 40k active series by default! Do we really need all that data? The current state of Kubernetes open source monitoring is in need of improvement. High churn rate of pod metrics, proliferation of metrics with low usage, and configuration complexity are some of the issues that need to be addressed.

I discussed this topic with Aliaksandr Valialkin, CTO at VictoriaMetrics and creator of the open source project. We discussed the common problems, as well as directions and best practices to overcome some of these complexities as individuals and as a community. We also discussed VictoriaMetrics open source project and how it addresses some of these challenges.

Aliaksandr a Golang engineer, who likes writing simple and performant code and creating easy-to-use programs. Sometimes these hard-to-match requirements work together, like in the VictoriaMetrics case.

The episode was live-streamed on 24 January 2023 and the video is available at https://www.youtube.com/live/Z-58C8HFGb8

OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube.

We live-stream the episodes on Twitch and YouTube Live - tune in to see us live, and chime in with your comments and questions on the live chat.
https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability
https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks

Have you got an interesting topic you'd like to share in an episode? Reach out to us and submit your proposal at https://openobservability.io/

Show Notes:


monitoring microservice system, app and communications
high churn rate for pod metrics
Kubernetes produces too many metrics by defaults, most of which are unused
recommended listing of metrics
removing unused metric labels to reduce cardinality
Prometheus native (exponential buckets) historgrams
Configuration complexity with multiple deployments
OpenTelemetry and OpenMetrics open specifications
collecting system metrics and application metrics uniformly
VictoriaMetrics essentials
VictoriaMetrics extensions beyond Prometheus
a full stack monitoring collection, analysis and alerting
how to join the VictoriaMetrics community
industry update: 2023 cloud native predictions post by CNCF CTO

Resources:


Why Prometheus cannot query remote storage in an expected way via remote_read protocol - https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/issues/4456 
VictoriaMetrics scaling to 100 million metrics per second https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfed9_Q0_qU
https://victoriametrics.com/
https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics/VictoriaMetrics
https://docs.victoriametrics.com/#community-and-contributions

Socials:


Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenObserv
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks
Website: https://openobservability.io/

Dotan Horovits 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/horovits  
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/horovits/  

Aliaksandr Valialkin

Twitter: https://twitter.com/valyala
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/valyala/

So much has been going on with the Prometheus project and its ecosystem, that it’s time to have a proper catch up. And there’s no better person to walk us through it than Julien Pivotto, who debriefed the community last month at PromCon.

Julien Pivotto is a maintainer of Prometheus, the open source monitoring and alerting solution. He is the co-founder of the company O11y, that provides premium support for open source observability tools such as Prometheus, Thanos and Grafana.

The episode was live-streamed on 19 December 2022 and the video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vui4EgveUxg

OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube.

We live-stream the episodes on Twitch and YouTube Live - tune in to see us live, and chime in with your comments and questions on the live chat.
https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability
https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks

Have you got an interesting topic you'd like to share in an episode? Reach out to us and submit your proposal at https://openobservability.io/

Show Notes:


Prometheus is 10 years old
Prometheus mission statement and directions
New Agent Mode for work with external backends
Service Discovery ecosystem, plugins and updates
Time series database basics and updates
New support for native histograms
Examplars in Prometheus to correlate metrics to traces
PromQL query language updates
PromLens contribution to Prometheus
Prometheus UI updates
Visualization options: Grafana and Perses 
Alertmanager updates
Windows exporter, MySQL and other new exporters
Long term support for Prometheus project
Thanos, Cortex, Mimir - ecosystem update
Prometheus community  

Resources:


PromCon EU 2022 talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Wlza5jrS-U
Prometheus GitHub: https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus
Why Your Monitoring Dashboard May Be Lying to You: https://horovits.medium.com/ca477e80589e

Socials:


Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenObserv
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLKOtaBdQAJVRJqhJDuOlPg
Website: https://openobservability.io/
Host: https://twitter.com/horovits 

At Meta (Facebook, Instragram et al) everything is data, and data driven approach is the rule, from product to engineering, from HR to finance. This is also how the team at Meta treats observability. Let’s see how we treat observability as a data analytics problem, and what you can implement, even if you’re not a hyperscaler.

On this episode I’ll host David Ostrovsky from Meta. David is a software developer with over 20 years of industry experience, speaker, trainer, blogger and co-author of “Pro Couchbase Server”. He specializes in large-scale distributed system architecture.

The episode was live-streamed on 7 November 2022 and the video is available at https://youtu.be/1l0HKUDoX4Q

OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube.

We live-stream the episodes on Twitch and YouTube Live - tune in to see us live, and chime in with your comments and questions on the live chat.
https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLKOtaBdQAJVRJqhJDuOlPg

Have you got an interesting topic you'd like to share in an episode? Reach out to us and submit your proposal at https://openobservability.io/

Show Notes:


Addressing business observability
Machine learning and predictions in observability
From the business inwards, using SLOs
Accelerate engineering quality with developer observability
Organizational and communications aspects of high scale observability
Actionable observability
How small-medium size orgs can achieve a similar effect
OpenTelemetry demo is GA
PromLens is open sourced and contributed to Prometheus

Resources:


TEMPLE signals for observability: https://medium.com/@YuriShkuro/temple-six-pillars-of-observability-4ac3e3deb402
PromLens open sourced: https://promlabs.com/blog/2022/10/25/promlabs-and-chronosphere-open-source-the-promlens-query-builder

Socials:


Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenObserv
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLKOtaBdQAJVRJqhJDuOlPg
Website: https://openobservability.io/

Everyone’s talking about Platform Engineering these days. Even Gartner featured it in its Hype Cycle for Software Engineering 2022. But what is Platform Engineering really about? Is it the next stage in the evolution of DevOps? Is it just a fancy rebrand for DevOps or SRE? And how does observability pertain to platform engineering?

On this episode of OpenObservability Talks Horovits hosted George Hantzaras, Director of Cloud Platform Engineering at Citrix. George is a distributed systems expert and a hands-on engineering leader with focus on delivering B2B cloud services at scale. Coming from a DevOps background, he focuses on implementing SRE at enterprise scale working with cloud native technologies. He has been organizing the Athens Cloud Computing Meetup since 2016 and the Athens Hashicorp User Group. Most recently, he has been a speaker at global events like Hashiconf, DeveloperWeek, Voxxed Days, DevNexus and more, focusing on reliability engineering, agile leadership, scaling engineering teams, and entrepreneurship.

The episode was live-streamed on 6 October 2022 and the video is available at https://youtu.be/zJGMUVY6fDM

OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube.

We live-stream the episodes on Twitch and YouTube Live - tune in to see us live, and chime in with your comments and questions on the live chat.
https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLKOtaBdQAJVRJqhJDuOlPg

Have you got an interesting topic you'd like to share in an episode? Reach out to us and submit your proposal at https://openobservability.io/

Show Notes:


Why Platform Engineering?
Different teams employ different stacks. How does Platform Engineering fits in?
Platform Engineering at Citrix
How does it map to the common DevOps maturity models?
Is Platform Engineering different from PaaS?
Platform as a product
Culture element is central in Platform Engineering
Generating buy-in within the product’s engineering
Metrics and quantifying the benefits of Platform Engineering
Balancing flexibility and simplicity, and striking the right level of abstraction
Delimitation between what’s developed by Platform vs. Product teams.
Generating Golden Paths for engineering
Observability and Platform Engineering

Resources:


George Hantzaras presentations
Designing Golden Paths
platformengineering.org
Platform Engineering KPIs

Socials:


Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenObserv
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLKOtaBdQAJVRJqhJDuOlPg
Website: https://openobservability.io/

Instrumentation is that black magic that makes our application emit traces, logs, metrics or other telemetry. How does it work? What options are available in different programming languages, such as Java, Python and Go? What does OpenTelemetry offer in this domain?  

On this episode of OpenObservability Talks I hosted Eden Federman, Co-Founder & CTO at keyval, a company focused on making observability simpler. Eden is the creator of two open source projects: Odigos and Go automatic instrumentation (now part of OpenTelemetry). Eden is passionate about everything related to observability and performance monitoring. He also created kubectl-flame, a profiler for Kubernetes.

The episode was live-streamed on 22 September 2022 and the video is available at https://youtu.be/VFykWV1mLAI

OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube.

We live-stream the episodes on Twitch and YouTube Live - tune in to see us live, and chime in with your comments and questions on the live chat.
https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLKOtaBdQAJVRJqhJDuOlPg

Have you got an interesting topic you'd like to share in an episode? Reach out to us and submit your proposal at https://openobservability.io/

Show Notes:


What is instrumentation
Manual and Automatic instrumentation
Different languages offer different options
Java instrumentation capabilities
Go instrumentation capabilities
Instrumentation when using programming frameworks
eBPF use in auto-instrumentation
New OpenTelemetry SIG for Go auto-instrumentation
Odigos open source project
Best practices for instrumentation

Resources:


Instrumentation basics and OpenTelemetry support
eBPF Automatic instrumentation for Go
Odigos (Observability Control Plane)
OpenTelemetry Go auto instrumentation SIG
How OpenTelemetry works under the hood in JavaScript
Spring Boot instrumentation
Spring Cloud Sleuth 1.1.0 released