VSHN.timer #78: Prometheus and Grafana

Welcome to another VSHN.timer! Every Monday, 5 links related to Kubernetes, OpenShift, CI / CD, and DevOps; all stuff coming out of our own chat system, making us think, laugh, or simply work better.

This week we’re going to talk about the latest news around Prometheus and Grafana, our best allies for monitoring Cloud Native apps.

1. How long should you store data in Prometheus? The default of 15 days is due to historic reasons, but Brian Brazil from Robust Perception says that it is totally reasonable to increase that time up to a year.

https://www.robustperception.io/how-long-can-prometheus-retention-be

2. One might think that monitoring and production are completely disconnected systems, yet… Oliver Leaver-Smith from Sky Betting and Gaming tells the story of a monitoring change that had a negative impact in the day-to-day operations of a very popular service.

https://sbg.technology/2020/12/09/its-just-a-monitoring-change/

3. Have you ever written any custom PromQL queries? The language allows for very interesting use cases, but it can look a bit intimidating at first sight. This article by Julius Volz from PromLabs tells you how PromQL queries are structured and evaluated.

https://promlabs.com/blog/2020/06/18/the-anatomy-of-a-promql-query

4. Also from PromLabs, check out the PromQL cheat sheet, build more powerful dashboards, and start getting deeper insights from your data.

https://promlabs.com/promql-cheat-sheet/

5. The tool of the week is grafana-sync, helping you keep your Grafana dashboards synchronized at all times.

https://github.com/mpostument/grafana-sync

Do you monitor systems with Prometheus and Grafana? Have you written your own PromQL queries? Would you like to share some tips with the community? Get in touch with us through the form at the bottom of this page, and see you next week for another edition of VSHN.timer.

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PS³: check out our previous VSHN.timer editions about specific products and vendors: #61 and #65.