3 ms·

"Hey, I'm trying to figure out some business metrics related to our infrastructure and application performance / uptime; do we have the data anywhere?" "Sure,

by cduzz 4y ago

"Hey, I'm trying to figure out some business metrics related to our infrastructure and application performance / uptime; do we have the data anywhere?" "Sure, Bob, just write a promql query against this interface" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1636348 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1636348 (in case my point is too subtle: I believe that the value of long term metric retention is to support business decisions more than supporting availability related monitoring. The tools "business deciders" use to look at "the things they call metrics" are simply unable to look at data lodged in a prometheus silo. So the data you have for long term retention is simply unusable for the thing it's most valuable) (edited for clarity)

flerchin 4y ago
I use thanos for availability related concerns. eg, Some metric crossed the threshold for saturation, and I can go back as far as I need to see when the metric began saturating. We have seasonal business patterns that I can show the high water-mark for resource consumption. Thanos also allows a CQRS-type pattern if that's important to folks. Do I point the biz at it? Only when I'm trying to show them availability related metrics.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
gjulianm 4y ago
What tools do they use? It's not hard to build a dashboard in Grafana and show them there the metrics they want, in an easily-digestible format.
- cduzz 4y ago
  There's an entire universe of people making business decisions who live in excel and "BI" tools. If your thing doesn't speak ODBC / JDBC it's invisible. Further, the vast majority of workaday devs are stressed out and under tremendous pressure to thing all the things in their ticket queue. They're probably pretty fluent in their thinging language and likely also conversant in SQL. Asking them "hey learn this other query language, because" is just adding stress to them. Sure, some are going to rise above and promql things too, but for lots, it's telling them to "write a distributed map reduce query in erlang."
  - gjulianm 4y ago
    PromQL is barely a language. For availability, the query would be as simple as the series name and it would return everything. Also, there's an adapter so that Prometheus writes to PostgreSQL. However, Prometheus is not a tool that specializes in reporting availability to people who live in Excel. Prometheus scrapes metric from a lot of systems in a standard format, and enables you to see what's happening and write alerts to fix things when they break, without requiring complex frameworks. Reporting availability to people is just a small, tiny thing that Prometheus is able to do.

by cduzz 4y ago

flerchin 4y ago

I use thanos for availability related concerns. eg, Some metric crossed the threshold for saturation, and I can go back as far as I need to see when the metric began saturating. We have seasonal business patterns that I can show the high water-mark for resource consumption. Thanos also allows a CQRS-type pattern if that's important to folks. Do I point the biz at it? Only when I'm trying to show them availability related metrics.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

gjulianm 4y ago

What tools do they use? It's not hard to build a dashboard in Grafana and show them there the metrics they want, in an easily-digestible format.

cduzz 4y ago
There's an entire universe of people making business decisions who live in excel and "BI" tools. If your thing doesn't speak ODBC / JDBC it's invisible. Further, the vast majority of workaday devs are stressed out and under tremendous pressure to thing all the things in their ticket queue. They're probably pretty fluent in their thinging language and likely also conversant in SQL. Asking them "hey learn this other query language, because" is just adding stress to them. Sure, some are going to rise above and promql things too, but for lots, it's telling them to "write a distributed map reduce query in erlang."
- gjulianm 4y ago
  PromQL is barely a language. For availability, the query would be as simple as the series name and it would return everything. Also, there's an adapter so that Prometheus writes to PostgreSQL. However, Prometheus is not a tool that specializes in reporting availability to people who live in Excel. Prometheus scrapes metric from a lot of systems in a standard format, and enables you to see what's happening and write alerts to fix things when they break, without requiring complex frameworks. Reporting availability to people is just a small, tiny thing that Prometheus is able to do.