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OSMC 2023 | Save the Date!

Are you in?

Make sure to mark your calendars for the 17th edition of the Open Source Monitoring Conference. OSMC 2023 will take place form November 07 – 09 in Nuremberg, Germany. The three-day event comprises up to four workshops on the first conference day, followed by two technical tracks on the second and third day. Take a look into our archives and see what’s awaiting you.

 

What are you waiting for?

The ticket sale is already running and we’re ready for our early birds! Get your tickets now and join OSMC 2023 for the best price. Discounted Tickets are available until June 30.

 

Get the OSMC feeling!

Whether you haven’t joined OSMC yet or were part of last years’ edition – we have a cool surprise for you. Check out the OSMC image video and get an impression of what OSMC is all about!

Enjoy!

 

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Katja Kotschenreuther
Katja Kotschenreuther
Marketing Manager

Katja ist seit Oktober 2020 Teil des Marketing Teams. Als Online Marketing Managerin kümmert sie sich neben der Optimierung unserer Websites und Social Media Kampagnen hauptsächlich um die Bewerbung unserer Konferenzen und Trainings. In ihrer Freizeit ist sie immer auf der Suche nach neuen Geocaches, bereist gern die Welt, knuddelt alle Tierkinder, die ihr über den Weg laufen und stattet ihrer niederbayrischen Heimat Passau regelmäßig Besuche ab.

OSMC 2022 | Monitoring multiple Kubernetes Clusters with Thanos

By now, Prometheus has become the defacto standard for monitoring containerised applications, especially when you are using orchestration tools like Kubernetes or Consul. However, when it comes to monitoring multiple Kubernetes clusters through a single plane of glass, additional tools are required. In his talk at the Open Source Monitoring Conference 2022 (OSMC), Pascal Fries showed how to set up a production monitoring landscape based on Prometheus and Thanos, spanning several Kubernetes clusters. Focussing on examples and best practices. He also elaborates on how to securely communicate between the individual components.

Pascal Fries works as a IT Consultant at the ATIX AG in Garching (near Munich) in Germany. As a specialist for Cloud Native technologies, among his main fields of expertise are configuration and administration of multi cluster Kubernetes environments. Including their monitoring with Prometheus and Thanos.

As an introduction, Paul asked the audience if they were using Kubernetes (in a single or multi cluster setup) or Prometheus. Prometheus works very well at monitoring multiple Kubernetes Clusters. But there are several problem areas that you should be aware of, like long term storage, high availability and redundancy. To illustrate this with an example, he mentioned a customer story about Kubernetes usage where multiple teams use Kubernetes, in sum over 20 clusters. There are shared, managed and owned clusters all together in that environment, and all teams need to have a single endpoint for getting their metrics. Other requirements are long term storage, high availability and push based monitoring. How can we make yure to meet all there requirements with our monitoring setup?

Thanos, a storage layer for Prometheus

To solve these requirements, he introduced us to Thanos. It is basically a storage layer for Prometheus.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To set it up, you can use sample configurations. Its also more secure, as gRPC and TLS auth are being used instead of REST and basic authentication. When Thanos is communicating with Thanos, they use TLS auth – otherwise of course basic auth.

The long term storage is realized by saving the data in an S3, which can be self hosted or on a cloud service like NETWAYS Web Services. For realizing a push-based monitoring, Thanos can act as a receiver and compactor. The receiver is a short term DB and shards/replicates the timeseries by labels. Unfortunately, the results are duplicates in the S3. The compactor on the other side deduplicates in the S3, and downsamples the data for faster queries.

All in all, Thanos is a great tool for a redundant and highly available long term storage for Prometheus Monitoring.

And the OSMC is a great conference with many interesting talks every year! Especially if you want to learn more about everything related to Open Source Monitoring. There were talks about monitoring, automation and open source in general. And many interesting talks with the attendees. Hearing and discussing the different opinions and use cases of and about technology is exciting for me. I have been working at NETWAYS as a Junior Consultant for 2 years now, and it was the second OSMC. I am looking forward to next year already!

The recording and slides of this talk and all other OSMC talks can be found in our Archives. The next OSMC takes place from November 7 – 9, 2023 in Nuremberg. Early Bird tickets are already on sale!

Björn Berg
Björn Berg
Junior Consultant

Björn hat nach seinem Abitur 2019 Datenschutz und IT-Sicherheit in Ansbach studiert. Nach einigen Semestern entschied er sich auf eine Ausbildung zum Fachinformatiker für Systemintegration umzusteigen und fing im September 2021 bei NETWAYS Professional Services an. Auch in seiner Freizeit sitzt er viel vor seinem PC und hat Spaß mit diversen Spielen, experimentiert auch mit verschiedenen Linux-Distributionen herum und geht im Sommer gerne mal campen.

OSMC 2022 | OpenTelemetry 101

This entry is part 4 of 3 in the series OSMC 2022

OSMC 2022 has brought lots of insightful open source expert know-how. In this blog series we will together take a glance back into our archives and pick out some of our highly appreciated speaker talks. Today we continue with Dotan’s talk “OpenTelemetry 101”.

 

That’s what it’s all about

Everyone wants observability into their system, but find themselves with too many vendors and tools, each with its own API, SDK, agent, and collectors. In his talk Dotan will present OpenTelemetry, an ambitious open source project with the promise of a unified framework for collecting observability data. With OpenTelemetry you could instrument your application in a vendor-agnostic way, and then analyse the telemetry data in your backend tool of choice, whether Prometheus, Jaeger, Zipkin, or others. He will cover the current state of the various projects of OpenTelemetry (across programming languages, exporters, receivers, protocols), some of which not even GA yet, and provide useful guidance on how to get started with it.

 

Get inspired by his Talk

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You like his content and want event more? Reason enough to join the next edition of the event. OSMC 2023 takes place from November 7 – 9, 2023 in Nuremberg. Early Bird tickets are already on sale. Grab yours now!

We’re looking forward to meeting you at OSMC 2023!

Katja Kotschenreuther
Katja Kotschenreuther
Marketing Manager

Katja ist seit Oktober 2020 Teil des Marketing Teams. Als Online Marketing Managerin kümmert sie sich neben der Optimierung unserer Websites und Social Media Kampagnen hauptsächlich um die Bewerbung unserer Konferenzen und Trainings. In ihrer Freizeit ist sie immer auf der Suche nach neuen Geocaches, bereist gern die Welt, knuddelt alle Tierkinder, die ihr über den Weg laufen und stattet ihrer niederbayrischen Heimat Passau regelmäßig Besuche ab.

OSMC 2022 | Unifying Observability: Weaving Prometheus, Jaeger, and Open Source Together to Win

In his talk at the Open Source Monitoring Conference 2022 (OSMC) Jonah Kowall – having more than 15 years of experience in the fields Ops, network, security, and performance engineering under his belt – tells us a lot about observability in the open source market. He also focusses on possible problems regarding licensing.

In the following I will give you a brief overview of the topics and concepts behind.

 

What is Observability?

First things first, what is observability? And how does it differ from monitoring?

To greatly simplify:

  • Monitoring is used to track specific criteria of given hosts/devices across your infrastructure. Thus, monitoring means having an eye on specific metrics such as CPU load or RAM usage. This enables you to notice problems as they occur and act accordingly.
  • Observability on the other hand means collecting “all” data. Based on the inputs a system receives and its respective outputs you are meant to be able to draw conclusions about your system’s state.

Sticking with the RAM example, monitoring can show you that your system runs low on memory, while observability can tell you why that is. This “why” is also helpful in order to act appropriately before the “that” happens. So, monitoring effectively follows a reactive approach and observability follows a proactive one.

Now let’s let his presentation give us an explanation.

 

 

Commercial vs. Open Source solutions

As Jonah goes on to explain, commercial tools for observability tend to be more coherent and complete out of the box when it comes to the user interface (UI).

Meanwhile – due to the nature of the open source world – open source solutions are oftentimes highly fragmented requiring a combination of multiple tools to fill in the complete picture. This in turn leads to more complexity due to multiple different underlaying architectures. As an example he brings up the ELK stack (Elasticsearch + Logstash + Kibana) which is just three parts of a more extensive system.

But even though probably nobody likes complexity itself open source solutions still seem to be vastly popular with companies and make up the majority of the observability landscape. In Jonah’s opinion this trend is also “the future of where things are going”.

 

Licensing

Many of us are used to at least seeing a license every once in a while. MIT, Apache and GPL are common terms to encounter when dealing with open source products.
You yourself might not have to deal with licenses directly but in one way or another you could be affected as well.

Imagine finding a new open source project or code snippets that help you with building your own project. Maybe those fix something that you just could not do or didn’t have time to do. Now licensing is important. Can I use this code? In what way can I use it? Could it backfire? The last question is especially important, according to Jonah.

There seems to be a trend with so called “copyleft licenses”. In this context copyleft effectively means: If you use that code in your own project, you need to open source your own code within that project as well. This is certainly something most companies don’t want to or simply cannot afford to do. After all, companies are still about making money.

But not only do companies have to deal with such issues. Communities surrounding open source projects also have to be careful what they bring into projects. Amongst other disagreements – for example about the current path of a project – licensing is also a contributing factor when it comes to forks popping up.

If you want to know a bit more about a certain fork in the open source observability world that might potentially achieve unified observability, be sure to give Jonah Kowall a few minutes of your time.

The recording and slides of this talk and all other OSMC talks can be found in our Archives. Check it out!

The next OSMC takes place from November 7 – 9, 2023 in Nuremberg. Early Bird tickets are already on sale!

Matthias Döhler
Matthias Döhler
Junior Consultant

Über ein paar Umwege ist Matthias nun endlich da gelandet, wo er sich wohl fühlt: in der IT! Bei NETWAYS hat er im September 2021 seine Ausbildung zum Fachinformatiker für Systemintegration im Bereich Professional Services begonnen. Wenn er sich zu Hause nicht auch noch mit Themen rund um Linux auseinandersetzt, sieht er sich leidenschaftlich gerne Horrorfilme und solche an, die man als "Trash" bezeichnen könnte. Je seltsamer, desto besser! Den üblichen Beschäftigungen wie Freunde treffen, Bars aufsuchen oder die Sonne im Freien genießen, geht er eben so nach wie pseudophilosophischen Fragen. Daneben spielt er außerdem wahnsinnig gerne Videospiele vergangener Generationen....

OSMC 2022 | Open Source: Open Choice – A DevOps Guide for OSS Adoption

This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series OSMC 2022

OSMC 2022 has brought lots of insightful open source expert know-how. In this blog series we will together take a glance back into our archives and pick out some of our highly appreciated speaker talks. Let’s continue with Hila’s talk “Open Source: Open Choice – A DevOps Guide for OSS Adoption”.

 

That’s what it’s all about

Choosing the right open source project to use can be quite challenging – not knowing if it’s going to be the right fit, how it will behave, and if you end up wasting time trying to make it all work. We’ve all been there. But what if Hila told you there’s a practical way to have a clear understanding of how to incorporate an OSS project in your environment? In this talk, she is going to speak about the DevOps perspective on open source and the challenges Infra-focused engineers have with choosing the right project for their environment. As a DevOps Engineer, she has seen a lot of things, stumbled upon a lot of non-based decisions, and so she will present practical advice on how to choose an OSS project for your dev/prod environment and will talk about the business mindset you should have to evaluate the key indicators based on your needs and specific pain points.

 

Get inspired by her Talk

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You like her content and want event more? Reason enough to join the next edition of the event. OSMC 2023 takes place from November 7 – 9, 2023 in Nuremberg. Early Bird tickets are already on sale!

Mark your calendars! We’re looking forward to meeting you there!

Katja Kotschenreuther
Katja Kotschenreuther
Marketing Manager

Katja ist seit Oktober 2020 Teil des Marketing Teams. Als Online Marketing Managerin kümmert sie sich neben der Optimierung unserer Websites und Social Media Kampagnen hauptsächlich um die Bewerbung unserer Konferenzen und Trainings. In ihrer Freizeit ist sie immer auf der Suche nach neuen Geocaches, bereist gern die Welt, knuddelt alle Tierkinder, die ihr über den Weg laufen und stattet ihrer niederbayrischen Heimat Passau regelmäßig Besuche ab.