Monitoring and observability Drive Conversation at C2C Connect: France Session on January 11

On January 11, 2022, C2C members @antoine.castex  and @guillaume blaquiere  hosted a powerful session for France and beyond in the cloud space. C2C Connect: France sessions intend to bring together a community of cloud experts and customers to connect, learn, and shape the future of cloud.

60 Minutes Summed Up in 60 Seconds

1. Yuri Grinshteyn, Customer SRE at Google Cloud, was the guest of the session.

2. Also known as "Stack Doctor" on YouTube, Grinshteyn advocates the best way to monitor, observe and follow the SRE best practices as learnt by Google in their own service SRE teams.

3. Grinshteyn explained the difference between monitoring and observability:

   1. Monitoring is "only" the data about a service, a resource.

   2. Observability is the behavior of the service metrics through time.

4. To observe data, you need different data sources; metrics, of course, but also logs and traces.

5. There are several tools available, but the purpose of each is observability: FluentD, Open Sensus, Prometheus, Graphana, etc. All are open-source, portable, and compliant with Cloud Operations.

6. The overhead of instrumented code is quite invisible, and the provided metrics are much more important than the few CPU cycles lost because of it.

7. Microservices and monoliths should use trace instrumentation. Even a monolith never works alone: it uses Google Cloud Services, APIs, Databases, etc. Trace allows us to understand North-South and East-West traffic.

Get in on the Monitoring and Observability Conversation!

Despite its 30-minute time limit, this conversation didn't stop. Monitoring and observability is a hot topic, and it certainly kept everyone's attention. The group spent time on monitoring, logging, error budget, SRE, and other topics such as: 

1. Cloud Operations

2. Managed Services for Prometheus

3. Cloud Monitoring

Members also shared likes and dislikes. For example, one guest, Mehdi, "found it unfortunate not to have out of the box metrics on GKE to monitor golden signals," and said "it's difficult to convince ops to install Istio just for observability." 

Preview What's Next

Two upcoming sessions will cover topics that came up but didn't make it to the discussion floor: