Learning Resources

Newsletters

Make sure to subscribe and also learn more in their online archive.

• o11y.news by Michael Hausenblas
• monitoring weekly by Jason Dixon
• opsindev.news by Michael Friedrich

Talks

- All Day DevOps 2021: From Monitoring to Observability: Left Shift your SLOs - All Day DevOps 2020: From Monitoring to Observability: Migration Challenges from Blackbox to Whitebox

Meetups

• SLOconf Monthly, former SRE meetup.
• #EveryoneCanContribute cafe meetup
  • 47. cafe: Observability, quo vadis
  • 32. cafe: Continuous Profiling with Polar Signals
  • 30. cafe: Kubernetes Monitoring with Prometheus
  • 25. cafe: Observability with Opstrace
  • 7. cafe: Docker Hub Rate Limit: Mitigation, Caching and Monitoring
  • 6. cafe: Grafana Tempo
  • 1. cafe: QuestDB

Trainings

There are many ways to learn, and also define Observability. This list is not exhaustive, a recommendation by individuals who have taken the trainings is preferred prior to adding a new entry.

Training	Vendor	Topics	Recommended by
Prometheus Trainings	PromLabs	Prometheus, App instrumentation, Kubernetes	@dnsmichi

Workshops

Practical Kubernetes Monitoring with Prometheus

The slides provide a 4+ hours workshop, more details are available on Michael Friedrich's personal blog. The following topics will be practiced:

• Monitoring, quo vadis puts the traditional monitoring in contrast to microservices.
• Prometheus and Grafana shares the basic knowledge on Prometheus, PromQL, Service Discovery and terminology required to understand.
• Kubernetes dives into understanding what to monitor, and how.
• Prometheus Operator dives into the concept of the package, and kube-prometheus installing a full stack. You'll dive into the UI of Prometheus, Grafana and the Alert Manager.
• K8s monitoring with Prometheus walks you through the - amazing - default Grafana dashboards, instructs you to deploy a Go demo app with the CRD ServiceMonitor, Container Metrics and kube-state-metrics exercises to practice PromQL queries.
• Advanced Monitoring practices with a Python app and own metrics, deployed to the GitLab container registry and to Kubernetes to query with PromQL in Grafana dashboards. Storage with Thanos/Cortex, Service Discovery is touched as well.
• Alerts and Escalations dives into the Alert Manager and rules, mapped into the PrometheusRule CRD.
• SLA, SLO, SLI keeps you busy with learning about Service Level Objectives for your production environment, providing thoughts on CI/CD quality gates with Keptn - and the OpenSLO spec, Pyrra and Sloth.
• Observability moves from Monitoring to metrics, logs, traces and beyond.
• Secure Monitoring discusses TLS, secret management, Infrastructure as code workflows, Container security and RBAC & policies.
• Ideas on more monitoring with Prometheus exporters, podtato-head, Chaos Engineering, etc.

A shorter version of the workshop as a talk was provided by Michael Friedrich at PromCon NA 2021, a zero day event at KubeCon NA.