Cloud-Native

Observability is crucial for understanding how your application operates in real-time. Among various observability signals—such as logs, traces, and continuous profiling—metrics play a significant role. They provide sampled measurements throughout the system, essential for ensuring service quality, improving performance, scalability, debuggability, security, and enabling real-time, actionable alerting. Building observable applications begins with proper instrumentation. While Prometheus tooling simplifies this process, there are still numerous opportunities for mistakes or misuse. In this talk, Jéssica Lins and Kemal Akkoyun present several useful patterns, best practices, and idiomatic methods for instrumenting critical services. They discuss common pitfalls, failure cases, and instrumentation strategies, sharing valuable insights and methods to avoid these mistakes. Additionally, they provide tips for writing simple, maintainable, and robust instrumentation facilities using real-life examples. The talk also demonstrates how to enrich metrics by correlating them with other observability signals and discusses how to best use recent changes in client_golang, the Go client library for Prometheus. ...

In modern days, we run our applications as loosely coupled micro-services on distributed, elastic infrastructure as (mostly) stateless workloads. Under these circumstances, observability has become a key attribute to understand how our applications run and behave in action, in order to provide highly available and resilient service. There exist several observability signals, such as “log”, “metric”, “tracing” and “profiling” that can be collected from a running service, which we can also call pillars of observability. Using these signals, we can create real-time, actionable alerts, create panels where we can monitor applications closely, and perform in-depth analysis to find the root of the systems’ failures. Within the Go and CNCF community, there are a variety of tools that can collect and make these observable signals useful. ...