Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Last week, Rachel published a guide describing the advantages of dynamic sampling. In it, we discussed varying sample rates to achieve a target collection rate overall, and having different sample rates for distinct kinds of keys. We also teased the idea of combining the two techniques to preserve the most important events and traces for debugging without drowning them out in a sea of noise.

AWS Lambda has a cool feature that can be both a blessing and a nightmare for a serverless application, depending on whether it’s properly handled by our code: the retry behavior. A retry occurs when an invocation of a Lambda function results in an error and the AWS Lambda platform automatically invokes the function again, with the same event payload. Before we get deeper, make sure you are familiar with the AWS documentation on the subject.

It’s been a while since the new Monitive codename “Freyja” was launched in private beta, and even though a lot of things have happened, development is moving forward a bit slow than I’ve hoped. Nevertheless, I’m happy that the core monitoring engine is running smoothly and it’s a great foundation for the years to come.

More often than we’d like to admit, we tend to underestimate the impact of every moving part within an organization—especially those that seem small or insignificant. And usually, it’s not until we’re facing the fallout of neglecting that seemingly insignificant factor when we realize what a mistake we’ve made.

There are countless Grafana dashboards that will only ever be seen internally. But there are also a number of large organizations that have made their dashboards public for a variety of uses. These dashboards can be interesting to browse, giving you an insider’s peek into how real Grafana users set up their visualizations, with actual live data to boot. Perhaps some of them will inspire you to get to work on your own Grafana?

For most of 2018, we worked on an overhaul of our underlying event storage system. We’d like to introduce you to the result of this work — Snuba, the primary storage and query service for event data that powers Sentry in production. Backed by ClickHouse, an open source column-oriented database management system, Snuba is now used for search, graphs, issue detail pages, rule processing queries, and every feature mentioned in our push for greater visibility.

Let’s not bury the lede here: we use Observability-Driven Development at Honeycomb to identify and prevent DB load issues. Like every online service, we experience this familiar cycle. This is not a bad thing! It’s a normal thing. Databases are easy to start with and do an excellent job of holding important data.

When you add high-quality images, infographics, videos, and other visual elements to your website, you don’t simply make it look more beautiful. You boost SEO, increase engagement, and make your content much more memorable. Great sites need amazing visual content.