This article explains why Prometheus alerts may not fire or may fire unexpectedly, covering the role of the for parameter, sampling intervals, Grafana range queries, and practical steps to diagnose and fix alerting issues.
This article demystifies Prometheus by explaining its core concepts, daily monitoring queries, the role of its TSDB storage engine, how series, label, and time indexes enable fast time‑series queries, and how pre‑computed recording rules boost performance for dashboards and alerts.
Discover five emerging open-source Kubernetes projects—including Quarkus, OpenTelemetry, Argo CD, Envoy/Contour, and OKD 4—that are driving cloud-native innovation in 2021 by enhancing Java workloads, observability, GitOps, traffic management, and developer tooling, and simplifying deployment pipelines.
This article explains the layered architecture of microservice monitoring, detailing five monitoring levels—from infrastructure to end-user experience—along with essential monitoring points such as logs, metrics, tracing, alerts, and health checks, and presents a typical monitoring stack using agents, Kafka, ELK, and InfluxDB.
This article recounts a two‑year journey of migrating from Ansible‑managed EC2 deployments to Kubernetes, detailing the motivations, migration strategy, operational challenges, tooling choices, resource management, security, cost considerations, and the development of custom controllers and CRDs to run production workloads reliably.
This tutorial explains how to create a Python‑based eBPF tool using the bcc framework to trace MySQL Group Replication's apply_data_packet function, covering environment setup, BPF program writing, attaching probes, and displaying real‑time thread and timestamp information.
This article analyses the shortcomings of traditional log‑collection agents, compares Flume and Filebeat based on low‑cost, stability, efficiency and lightweight criteria, and presents practical solutions for file discovery, offset tracking, multi‑line handling and performance tuning in modern logging pipelines.
This article explains Loki's origins, data model, LogQL query language, low‑cost storage design, and the full read‑write architecture—including Distributor, Ingester, Querier, and QueryFrontend—showing how it solves the shortcomings of traditional Elasticsearch‑based logging solutions and integrates tightly with Prometheus monitoring.
This article recounts Grofers' two‑year journey migrating from Ansible‑managed EC2 instances to Kubernetes, detailing the motivations, migration strategy, operational challenges, observability choices, CI/CD tooling, resource management, security practices, cost considerations, and the overall impact on development velocity and platform stability.
This article explains how Netflix built the Telltale monitoring system to consolidate data sources, provide multidimensional health assessments, deliver intelligent alerts, and streamline incident management for over 100 production applications, reducing on‑call fatigue and improving service reliability.
Facing rapid growth in 2019, Yanxuan partnered with NetEase Qingzhou to co‑build a cloud‑native platform, detailing a multi‑stage migration that standardized services, reduced code changes, enhanced high‑availability, optimized performance, and improved observability, ultimately supporting over 300 cloud‑migrated services and boosting development efficiency by more than 200%.
This article explains why standard Prometheus HA solutions fall short for large, multi‑region deployments, and walks through using Thanos—its components, configuration, and best‑practice tips—to achieve long‑term storage, unlimited scaling, a global view, and non‑intrusive monitoring across 300+ clusters.
This comprehensive guide explains what a service mesh is, outlines its core capabilities, introduces Istio as a leading implementation, and provides step‑by‑step instructions for installing Istio on Kubernetes, injecting sidecars, configuring gateways, deploying the Bookinfo demo, and visualizing traffic and metrics.
This article examines the challenges of log management in Kubernetes environments and compares five popular solutions—Zebrium, Sematext, Loki, ELK Stack, and Fluentd—highlighting their key features, advantages, and limitations to help you choose the right tool.
This article explains the distinct purposes and characteristics of monitoring, tracing, and logging in system design, compares their typical toolchains such as Prometheus, Jaeger, and ELK, and clarifies when each component is necessary for effective observability.
The 2017‑initiated vivo distributed tracing system leverages a JavaAgent‑based micro‑kernel architecture, using ByteBuddy for non‑intrusive bytecode instrumentation, a Disruptor lock‑free queue, and Kafka to capture Trace/Span data—including cross‑thread propagation—while employing sampling, degradation, and JVM metrics to ensure 94% adoption stability.
This article defines cloud native as an optimal, low‑overhead approach to designing software that lives in the cloud, outlines its key technology domains—including containers, Kubernetes, service mesh, observability, and serverless—and explains why evolving infrastructure to the cloud brings consistency, scalability, and immutable deployment advantages.
This article explores cloud‑native software architecture, covering the 12‑factor app foundation, loose‑coupled design, API‑first and SOLID principles, event‑driven and service‑mesh patterns, observability, serverless runtimes, and emerging technologies such as Dapr, GraalVM and WebAssembly.
This article explains the principles, architecture, and practical adoption of distributed tracing—covering OpenTracing standards, SkyWalking's design, sampling strategies, plugin development, and real‑world company practices—to help engineers pinpoint bottlenecks and improve observability in microservice systems.
This article outlines a request log analysis system that records core request fields, adds proxy‑related data, derives IP‑based ASN and geographic information, parses user‑agent details, and provides comprehensive metrics such as PV/QPS, UV, traffic, latency, status monitoring, and business‑specific insights, all visualized via an ELK‑Kafka architecture.
Loki 2.0.0 introduces major enhancements such as a revamped LogQL pipeline, native Prometheus‑style alerts, and simplified storage with boltdb‑shipper, delivering a more resource‑efficient, scalable log aggregation solution for Kubernetes environments.
This article translates and expands on the author’s seven‑year experience with monitoring and alerting, presenting symptom‑based principles, practical guidelines for rule design, incident handling, and operational processes to create a robust, low‑noise alerting system.
This article explains why monitoring is essential, compares white‑box and black‑box approaches, details Prometheus features, metric naming, query language, high‑availability challenges, and shows how to extend Prometheus with Thanos, Pushgateway, Alertmanager, and Kubernetes deployments for a robust observability stack.
The article recounts a production outage caused by cloud‑platform network jitter, details step‑by‑step fault diagnosis using logs, APM and monitoring, reproduces the issue with chaos‑engineered Redis/Redisson faults, and outlines how the team turned the incident into a systematic fault‑drill practice.
Alibaba Cloud’s Log Service (SLS) has evolved into a unified observability middle‑platform that handles tens of petabytes daily, offering integrated storage, processing, and AI‑driven analysis for logs, metrics, and traces, while addressing challenges of data ingestion, performance, and scalability across diverse Ops scenarios.
This tutorial walks through creating a multi‑node KIND Kubernetes cluster, disabling the default CNI, installing Cilium 1.8.2 via Helm with Hubble enabled, demonstrating eBPF‑based network security and observability, deploying a test application, and verifying CiliumNetworkPolicy effects.
Envoy 1.15 introduces a Postgres filter that transparently parses the PostgreSQL wire protocol, extracts rich metrics without any server‑side changes, and exports them to Prometheus, while outlining its design goals, current capabilities, usage steps, limitations, and future roadmap.
This article explains how to design a non‑intrusive distributed tracing system for microservices by assigning global TraceIDs, generating hierarchical SpanIDs, using lightweight agents to propagate identifiers via transport headers, and aggregating data in a collector to visualize complete call graphs and diagnose performance issues.
A comprehensive Q&A with SRE experts explores how Zabbix and Prometheus compare across scalability, storage, alert handling, intelligent monitoring, dashboard design, automation, migration strategies, and performance‑cost trade‑offs for modern infrastructure.
This article explains the fundamentals of distributed tracing, the OpenTracing standard, and how SkyWalking implements automatic span collection, cross‑process context propagation, unique traceId generation, sampling strategies, performance benchmarks, and real‑world adaptations within a micro‑service environment.
Didi’s Seven‑Layer Access Platform, handling millions of QPS and hundreds of billions of daily requests across thousands of services, provides ultra‑stable, sub‑millisecond routing through Nginx‑based data and control planes, advanced service discovery, rate‑limiting, observability, zero‑risk change controls, and is now evolving toward a cloud‑native, mesh‑enabled sidecar architecture.
This article explains how enterprises adopting SRE can design a comprehensive observability platform—covering metrics, logs, and tracing—while also detailing effective incident response, post‑mortem practices, testing, capacity planning, automation tool development, and user‑experience focus to improve overall operational reliability.
This article explains why the HTTP trace feature disappears in Spring Boot Admin after version 2.2.x, details the investigation steps that reveal the default disabling of the InMemoryHttpTraceRepository, and recommends using third‑party tracing solutions such as Prometheus with Grafana for observable metrics.
This article outlines ByteDance’s adoption of chaos engineering, describing its background, industry examples, the evolution of internal fault‑injection platforms across three generations, the fault model and center design, experiment principles, and future plans for infrastructure‑level chaos and automated diagnostics.
This article explains SkyWalking’s modular, protocol‑oriented and lightweight architecture, its core components, design principles, and advantages such as cross‑environment consistency, easy maintenance, high performance, and extensibility for both traditional and cloud‑native systems.
iQIYI’s tech product team designed a unified full‑link automated monitoring platform that integrates link, metric, and log collection with deep analysis, enhancing fault localization, performance insight, and scalability across microservices, while addressing limitations of existing tools like ELK, Prometheus, and Dapper.
This article explains the purpose and operation modes of Prometheus exporters, details the text-based metric exposition format including HELP, TYPE, and sample lines for counters, gauges, summaries, and histograms, and provides a complete Go example showing how to build, run, and expose a custom exporter with Prometheus client libraries.
This article explains why Medium transitioned from a monolithic Node.js application to a microservice architecture, outlines the three core design principles, shares practical strategies for building and operating services, and warns about common pitfalls such as the microservice syndrome.
A senior infrastructure engineer shares hard‑won lessons from migrating a large team to pure Kubernetes, covering deployment speed, error reduction, observability, networking, monitoring, GitOps, custom operators, secret handling, CI, and logging challenges in modern cloud‑native environments.
This article guides backend engineers through common service issues, a systematic troubleshooting workflow, essential diagnostic tools, and practical performance, stability, and maintainability optimizations to keep online systems reliable and efficient.
This article explains the motivations behind choosing Loki over traditional ELK/EFK stacks for container‑cloud logging, outlines its cost‑effective design, describes its simple architecture and components such as Distributor, Ingester, and Querier, and highlights its scalability and seamless integration with Prometheus.
This article explains the motivations behind Loki, its architecture and components, how it reduces the cost and complexity of log and metric querying compared to ELK, and details its write‑read pipeline, scalability, and integration with Kubernetes and Prometheus.
Modern monitoring has evolved into comprehensive observability, encompassing metrics, logging, tracing, and events, and requires specialized storage solutions for each data type; this article explores the origins, key concepts, and design considerations for building effective observability systems in today's complex internet engineering landscape.
This article introduces Filebeat as a container log collector, explains why it was chosen, outlines its core architecture and processing flow, and provides a practical configuration example for sending logs to Kafka, offering a solid foundation for further development and deeper source‑code analysis.
This article details KuJiaLe's journey from monolithic to micro‑service architecture, the stability challenges encountered, and how they designed and deployed a ChaosBlade‑based fault‑injection platform that improves fault tolerance, accelerates incident response, and enhances overall user experience.
This article explains how Envoy, a lightweight high‑performance L7 proxy and communication bus, provides non‑intrusive sidecar architecture, multi‑layer networking, HTTP/2 support, dynamic configuration, gRPC and special protocol handling, and built‑in observability for cloud‑native systems.
This guide explains why APM tools are essential for microservice architectures, introduces SkyWalking’s features and architecture, and provides step‑by‑step instructions for installing, configuring, and using SkyWalking with both Java and .NET applications, including multi‑service tracing visualizations.
This article outlines ten frequent Istio exceptions—from service port naming constraints and flow‑control ordering to mTLS‑induced connection drops—explaining their root causes, diagnostic steps, and practical best‑practice solutions for reliable mesh deployments.
This article explains how container technology, inspired by shipping containers, transforms software delivery with modular, lightweight virtualization, and how Alibaba Cloud’s container services—ACK, ASK, ACR, and ASM—provide agile, elastic, portable, and secure cloud‑native solutions for hybrid and multi‑cloud environments.
The Istio 1.6 release introduces a fully migrated Istiod architecture, streamlined installation and upgrade processes, expanded observability features, native support for virtual‑machine workloads via WorkloadEntry, and several network enhancements including improved secret handling and experimental Service API support.
This article details the design, implementation, and evolution of NetEase Cloud Music's full‑link tracing platform, covering its motivations, architecture, low‑overhead data collection, multi‑dimensional analysis, service grooming, automated diagnosis, and future plans for AI‑driven anomaly detection and big‑data processing.
Grafana 7.0 introduces a revamped user experience, a unified data model, a new plugin platform, Jaeger tracing support, powerful data transformations, AWS CloudWatch Logs integration, and enterprise usage analytics, offering enhanced visualization and monitoring capabilities across major data sources.
EMonitor, Meituan’s unified monitoring platform, extends CAT’s concepts with real‑time 10‑second aggregation, richer metric types, advanced dashboards, and seamless integration across IaaS, PaaS, and application layers, illustrating the evolution from log‑based monitoring to a comprehensive, proactive observability system.
This article introduces Didi's open‑source monitoring system Nightingale, detailing its design, architecture, key improvements over Open‑Falcon, and how its flexible alerting and data handling capabilities support the full lifecycle of stability engineering in large‑scale operations.
This article provides a comprehensive introduction to Istio, explaining what a service mesh is, its core components and functions, the challenges it addresses in microservice architectures, and practical steps for adopting Istio in production environments.
This article describes ByteDance’s multi‑generation chaos engineering practice, covering industry background, fault‑injection models, the design of a declarative fault‑center, experiment selection principles, detailed experiment processes, metric classifications, red‑blue war‑game workflows, strong/weak dependency analysis, and future directions for infrastructure‑level chaos engineering.
This article examines the evolution of Tencent's TSF Mesh Service Mesh platform, detailing its architecture, the technical hurdles faced when supporting heterogeneous environments, multi‑tenant isolation, DNS and Spring Cloud interoperability, and the solutions implemented to achieve robust, cloud‑native service governance.
This article provides a detailed analysis of Thanos' architecture, explaining each core component—Query, Sidecar, Store Gateway, Ruler, Compact, and the upcoming Receiver—how they enable global view, high availability, and long‑term storage for distributed Prometheus deployments, and discusses design trade‑offs and optimization strategies.
This article introduces the core concepts and architecture of the open‑source Prometheus monitoring system, explains its data model and metric types, and provides a step‑by‑step guide to install a Prometheus server, collect host metrics with Node Exporter, and visualize them using Grafana.
This article explains what Istio is, outlines the major updates in version 1.5—including the unified istiod control plane, WebAssembly extensibility, simplified installation, and improved observability—describes core control‑plane components, and provides step‑by‑step instructions for preparing a Kubernetes cluster and installing Istio.
This article details NetEase's game monitoring system that supports billions of users worldwide, covering global monitoring challenges, a layered observability architecture, massive time‑series processing, visualisation and alerting mechanisms, and intelligent AI‑driven anomaly detection practices.
Nightingale, Didi’s open‑source enterprise monitoring platform, builds on Open‑Falcon but adds a hierarchical object tree, in‑memory indexing, Gorilla‑compressed time‑series storage, a hybrid push‑pull alert engine, built‑in log monitoring, and a unified monapi module, delivering scalable, cloud‑native observability for both container and bare‑metal workloads.
This article explains why modern services depend on highly available, scalable monitoring, outlines a systematic way to assess and improve monitoring capabilities using open‑source tools and the DevOps Capability Maturity Model, and details concrete improvement points across data collection, management, and application.
This article provides a hands‑on guide to building a reliable Kubernetes logging system, covering log level selection, content standards, output formats, volume control, multiple targets, performance impact, library choices, storage options, and long‑term retention strategies.
This article explains why monitoring is essential for operations, outlines the four‑layer monitoring standard (infrastructure, liveliness, performance, business), breaks down functional modules and data flows, and showcases JD Cloud's practical design, alarm‑convergence project, and future AI‑driven observability directions.
This article describes the design, implementation, and deployment of a PHP extension that enables automated, low‑overhead monitoring of web API performance, detailing its flexible configuration, high resource efficiency, concurrency handling, and successful production rollout within the 58 rental business platform.
This article outlines ten essential microservices best practices—from domain‑driven design and independent databases to async communication, observability, and organizational alignment—providing a comprehensive guide for building scalable, maintainable service‑oriented systems.
This article explains how the Thanos and Prometheus combination provides long‑term, highly available monitoring for massive OpenStack and Ceph clusters, detailing its features, architecture, key components, practical deployment issues, and the operational problems it resolves.
This article explains how Alibaba Cloud Container Service (ACK) designs a unit‑based, tiered management system, capacity planning model, global observability architecture, and pluggable components to reliably operate more than ten thousand diverse Kubernetes clusters during the massive Double‑11 shopping event.
This article recounts Huang Jie’s presentation on the evolution of Ele.me’s monitoring system, detailing its three development stages, the challenges faced, the layered monitoring architecture, the design of a unified platform supporting both PC and mobile, and the underlying LinDB time‑series database.
The talk explains how Elastic Stack can be used to achieve comprehensive observability for cloud‑native applications through a four‑step methodology—health checks, metrics, logging, and tracing—detailing the challenges, implementation details, and best practices for monitoring and debugging modern microservice systems.
This article explains how to design and implement a flexible, high‑performance log system for Kubernetes environments, covering demand‑driven architecture, functional requirements, open‑source component choices, the reasons for a custom solution, and the operational challenges faced at massive scale.
This article compares Meituan’s in‑house EMonitor with the open‑source CAT platform, outlines their core monitoring models, sampling pipelines, custom metrics and integration capabilities, and traces the evolution of monitoring stages from log‑based to intelligent root‑cause analysis.
This article explains the purpose, core functions, classification, layered architecture, and popular implementations of IT monitoring systems, covering log‑based, trace‑based, and metric‑based approaches as well as a comparison of Zabbix and Prometheus.
Grafana 6.4, released on October 2 2019, introduces a suite of enhancements—including Explore navigation, real‑time log viewing, new log panels, Data Link upgrades, Series Override line rendering, shared query results, an Alpine‑based Docker image, deprecation of PhantomJS, and the Alpha release of grafana‑toolkit—plus numerous UI and performance improvements.
The article explains cloud native concepts, detailing its key characteristics, four foundational pillars, organizational practices, architectural patterns, essential tooling, and operational responsibilities that enable agile, scalable, and highly available applications built on cloud infrastructure.
This article explains the essential functions of IT monitoring systems, classifies them into log, trace, and metric types, describes a five‑layer monitoring architecture, and compares two popular open‑source solutions—Zabbix and Prometheus—helping practitioners choose the right tool for their environment.
This article shares Alibaba's extensive experience building a Kubernetes‑based logging system, detailing the evolution from single‑machine to containerized environments, the critical role of observability, and the specific technical challenges such as dynamic log sources, integration complexity, and massive scale handling.
This article explains the three main monitoring approaches—log collection, distributed tracing, and metric gathering—in microservice architectures, outlines the layered monitoring model, lists key system, application, and user metrics, and reviews popular open‑source time‑series monitoring tools such as Prometheus, OpenTSDB, and InfluxDB.
The article recounts JD Digits architect Zhang Liang’s experience representing the Apache ShardingSphere community at ApacheCon 2019 in Las Vegas, describing the conference atmosphere, community interactions, ShardingSphere’s observability talk and Shark Tank showcase, and the growing Chinese contribution to the Apache ecosystem.
Prometheus, an open‑source monitoring and alerting toolkit originally developed by SoundCloud and now a CNCF project, offers multidimensional data models, flexible queries, pull‑based data collection, various metric types (counter, gauge, summary, histogram), local and remote storage, service discovery, and integrates with Grafana for visualization.
This guide surveys the most popular open‑source distributed tracing projects, classifying them by instrumentation, tracer, and analysis capabilities, and explains how they fit into modern microservice observability, helping newcomers understand each tool’s strengths, integrations, and the broader tracing ecosystem.
This article explains the fundamentals of Prometheus histogram metrics, illustrates why they are cumulative, shows how to drop unwanted buckets with relabeling, and demonstrates quantile calculations using the histogram_quantile function, providing practical examples and code snippets for effective monitoring.
This article explains why comprehensive, multi‑layer monitoring is essential for distributed systems, outlines environment, program, and business metrics, recommends practical tools such as Zabbix, open‑falcon, Prometheus and Grafana, and provides a step‑by‑step evolution plan and alerting strategy.
The article recounts Medium's transition from a monolithic Node.js application to a microservice architecture, explaining the motivations, core design principles, practical strategies, tooling choices, and lessons learned to avoid common pitfalls and improve development velocity and system reliability.
This article details the design, architecture, and AI‑driven features of 58’s intelligent monitoring platform, explaining how multi‑dimensional data collection, predictive analytics, and smart alarm merging ensure continuous, automated observability across network, server, application, and business layers.
This article explains why Jaeger is a popular cloud‑native tracing solution, describes its architecture, sampling options, and deployment strategies on Kubernetes—including DaemonSet and Sidecar modes—followed by a step‑by‑step Django integration example and guidance on monitoring, alerting, and resource cleanup.
This article explains why Medium transitioned from a monolithic Node.js application to a microservice architecture, outlines the three core design principles, shares practical strategies for service creation, decoupling, observability, deployment, and how to avoid common microservice pitfalls.
This article explains Prometheus metric naming conventions, label usage, metric types such as Counter, Gauge, Summary, and Histogram, and describes the structure of data samples, providing examples and best‑practice guidelines for defining and classifying metrics in monitoring systems.
This article introduces Istio as an open‑source service mesh, explains its data‑plane and control‑plane architecture, outlines its traffic management, security, and telemetry features, discusses performance considerations, and shows how Lingque Cloud ASM leverages Istio to solve typical microservice problems such as debugging, testing, release processes, and flexible network policies.
Apache SkyWalking, an open‑source observability platform that originated in 2015, has graduated to a top‑level Apache project, offering comprehensive APM features such as distributed tracing, metrics, service topology, root‑cause analysis, and flexible storage options for cloud‑native microservice environments.
The article explains why enterprise application monitoring systems are essential, outlines their core components such as Trace, Log, Metric, and Report, discusses distributed tracing techniques, and describes how these insights are designed to aid developers, testers, and operations engineers in performance tuning and fault diagnosis.
This article explains why systematic logging is essential for production debugging, introduces a practical log classification and field schema, describes trace‑ID propagation and performance instrumentation, and walks through building an ELK‑based log collection, storage, and real‑time visualization platform for reliable observability.
This article explains why most alerts are poorly designed, defines actionable alerts, outlines monitoring objectives, discusses metric selection, and presents simple yet powerful algorithms for anomaly detection to improve system reliability and operational efficiency.
This article presents nine practical logging best‑practice recommendations—from understanding human and machine audiences and standardizing log formats to leveraging metrics, proper alerting, severity levels, contextual information, and advanced framework features—helping operations teams improve system performance and troubleshooting efficiency.
This article explains how to approach monitoring for a newly introduced system by focusing on white‑box metric collection, distinguishing basic and business metrics, outlining common collection methods, and detailing Google SRE's four golden indicators—error, latency, traffic, and saturation—to guide effective observability.
This article introduces a series of microservice design patterns—including database isolation, observability, and cross‑cutting concerns—explaining the underlying problems each pattern solves and providing concrete solutions such as CQRS, Saga, log aggregation, health checks, and blue‑green deployments.
This presentation details how to correctly benchmark MySQL middleware performance, exposing common pitfalls, describing practical testing methodologies, emphasizing the need to observe both middleware and actual database pressure, and discussing distributed transaction considerations and metric selection for reliable results.
This article explains what APM (Application Performance Management) is, its core concepts, how Java agents collect performance data, the process of integrating APM into distributed systems, and how it helps locate slow interfaces and improve overall application reliability.
This tutorial explains how to use Byte Buddy to build a JavaAgent for SkyWalking, debug and continuously integrate the agent, and develop custom SkyWalking plugins such as the kob scheduling framework, providing step‑by‑step code examples and configuration details for observability in Java backend services.
