Ask Sendai

Grafana is the defacto dashboarding solution for time-series data. It supports over 40 datasources (as of this writing), and the dashboarding story has matured considerably with new features, including the addition of teams and folders. We now want to move on from being a dashboarding solution to being an observability platform, to be the go-to place when you need to debug systems on fire. Observability. There are a lot of definitions out there as to what that means.

Kubernetes is a remarkable success story: A container orchestration technology that made its first public appearance barely three years ago now plays a pivotal role at thousands of organizations that have adopted container-based application architectures. Perhaps the most amazing thing about Kubernetes, however, isn’t what it’s accomplishing today—it’s that we’re just getting started! If current trends hold, within a few more years we expect to see customers deploying container orchestration on a scale far surpassing how most organizations deploy it today.

Uber, like most large technology companies, relies extensively on metrics to effectively monitor its entire stack. From low-level system metrics, such as memory utilization of a host, to high-level business metrics, including the number of Uber Eats orders in a particular city, they allow our engineers to gain insight into how our services are operating on a daily basis. As our dimensionality and usage of metrics increases, common solutions like Prometheus and Graphite become difficult to manage and sometimes cease to work.

As an entrepreneur and the CTO of a young startup, keeping a close eye on the product is at the top of my priorities. To keep improving the product, I’m always alert to new issues; and seeing those issues from different perspectives is key to resolving problems before users are affected. This is where monitoring comes in. In this blog post, I will get you into my stack and share the list of monitoring tools I’m using on a daily basis.