I recently presented a talk at Monitorama 2024 titled 'The Hater's Guide to OpenTelemetry'. The slides for that talk are available at https://austinlparker.github.io/monitorama-2024.

The presentation is built in reveal.js -- you can access the spe


This post is a response/companion to Hazel Weakly's excellent 'Redefining Observability'. You should probably read it first, a

I'm going to weigh in on the Redis thing.

First, I want to touch on this quote from the article I linked above:

_“Particularly with Speedb, this is a big investmen


I like to joke that I got into developer relations because I was the rare programmer that could carry on a conversation for more than five minutes


I'm knee-deep in production for Learning OpenTelemetry, releasing in just over a month. This is my second book, so I figured it was a good time


I'm motivated to write this post as a result of several discussions I've had over the past week or so prompted in part by the announcement of Elastic wanting to [donate their profilin


Ever asked ChatGPT about OpenTelemetry? There's a pretty good chance that what it spits out at you started out as something I wrote, years ago. When the project started, I picked up w


I used to joke that there were maybe fifty people on the planet that really cared about 'observability' at a philosophical level, and I still maintain that I'm mostly correct. Maybe y


OpenTelemetry can be a difficult project to describe to people, because the gap between what it is today and what it will be tomorrow is very large. It's easy to stare at it from a

Let's see if this thing is on, yeah? This post should appear on Mastodon under @aparker@aparker.io, and (eventually) on ATProto as well as its own account... and when people like/repost/reply to it, those should show up in the header/footer.

I couldn't find a ton of resources on this, but FYI -- the OpenTelemetry Collector's filelog receiver has a pretty robust regex parser built into it. Want to get your access.log files from Apache? Here's the config.

  filelog/access:
    include: [ /var/log/apache2/access.log ]
    operators

Sampling is a method to reduce the volume of data processed and stored by observability tools. There’s a variety of methods and algorithms that can be employed to d

“I wasn’t trained to do that.”

I looked at the significantly more senior engineer sitting across from me in the white-and-startup-blue offices of a former job. Sca

Being between jobs is a great time to step back, do some self-critique, and engage in light home improvement for fun and or profit. It’s this last pursuit that’s convinced me that if this whole computer thing doesn’t work out, I’m screwed — I don’t have the spirit of a tradesperson in my body. This

It’s probably still too early to write

Like several of the tech twitterati, I've recently been going g

"It's not going to happen."

A friend of mine (@mononcqc) turned me on to an essay titled ['Unruly Bodies of Code in Time'

By any scientific metric, the risk of COVID-19 infection is greater than it's ever been, while mitigation efforts have regressed to a shrugging emoji. Being offered an alcohol wipe by a smiling, unmasked flight attendant before spending hours breathing other people’s air in a narrow metal tube is p

I wrote a post a little while ago about [how SRE is really just

"We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it."

The Agile Manifesto, 2001.

It's been quipped more than once that most amazing Silicon Valley innovations are simply a bunch of nerds poorly recreating a service that already exists, but with an app

In my experience, it’s the ideas that you don’t expect to work that really take off. When I registered a domain name a month ago for Deserted Island DevOps, I can say pretty confidently that I didn’t expect it to turn into an event with over 8500 viewers. Now that we’re on the other side of it, I f

Running Debian 9 and need to install the mono repository? You'll find advice for 8 that suggests using the following:

sudo apt install apt-transport-https dirmngrnsudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv-keys 3FA7E0328081BFF6A14DA29AA6A19B38D3D831EFnecho "deb https:/

Preface - I really like what Microsoft is doing with .NET Core and ASP.NET Core.

However, the horror they've unleashed upon the world in the form of ASP.NET MVC and WebAPI is a sin that will take more than a few moons to wash away. That said, quite a few people are still building software using th

Jira - love it, hate it, begrudgingly accept it - it's a fact of life for many of us in the software world. One thing that particularly sucks about Jira to me is that there appears to be an eternal tension regarding process.

You've probably got a boatload of various processes that you'd like to be

Since I joined the Apprenda team, the ritual of daily R&D team standups have been a pretty constant companion. Being able to to get a ten-thousand foot view of our progress helps keep everyone on the same page, even as our team has grown over the years. One of the rituals of our morning standups ha