Category: Observability
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Mastering Python Networking Review
I came across Mastering Python Networking by Eric Chou about a month ago on Twitter and immediately purchased it. I was excited to see book on programming targeted at people with a networking background as being able to automate becomes critical to scaling networks and reducing toil. To say I’m a fan of this book…
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Practical OpenTelemetry Review
OpenTelemetry is something I’ve been watching for a while now and reviewing Practical OpenTelemetry was the perfect excuse to dive deeper. In my lab I’ve been running a project called SigNoz for which I’m writing up a companion article to this one to show some practical examples. When I first looked into OpenTelemetry about 4…
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The CrUX Of Web Performance
The world of web performance is tougher than most internal applications because you are dealing with third parties that you don’t. The Internet, browsers (with a thousand tabs open), endpoints (with agents running), and poor connectivity in the form of cellular/wireless/consumer grade connections. This means that we need to be able to understand and manage…
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XDP: Your eBPF Packet Processing Introduction!
I want to let you in on why I think XDP (eXpress Data Path) is so awesome and will change the game when it comes to security, routing, and application delivery.
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SaaS to on-prem and back again! Interview With a Professional Services Director
Earlier this week I meet with a good friend of mine (who we’ll call Martin) who works as a Director of Professional Services. Martin works at a global enterprise software company. We’d been discussing a recent article I wrote on Cloud Migrations in Reverse and we discussed why he had seen some of his customers…
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Performance Diagnostics Part 5- Optimising Worker Threads
Background A few (ok many) years ago I was working with a customer who was launching a new application and was expecting a high load on their launch, which for whatever reason was at 3pm on a Friday (1). As 3pm hit, and the load balancers started directing traffic to the now production system, there…
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Learning eBPF Review
What makes Learning eBPF different to BPF Performance tools (which I wrote about recently) is that it moves beyond theObservability and performance lens towards Security and modification behaviour inside the Linux kernel. The author Liz Rice is the Chief Open Source Officer at Isovalent and recently presented at the eBPF Virtual Summit in September of…
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Performance Diagnostics Part 3 — Latency beyond Ping
Network teams often use ICMP as a mechanism to determine the latency (propagation delay etc) and reachability between two endpoints using the trusty Ping utility. Ping appeared in late 1983 created Mike Muuss while working US Ballistics Research Laboratory. Additionally, what was interesting about 1983 is that it was the year the that the US military converged on…
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Why Are We Seeing Cloud Migrations in Reverse?
I’ve always loved using excess or old computers and network infrastructure to lab things up or run a PoC for an application or service. I still have a Dell R710 and HP ML10v2 I use to run services like Home Assistant and various observability tools for testing. So what does this have to do with…
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BPF Performance Tools Review
BPF Performance Tools the kind of book an observability specialist picks up and thinks this will make a good reference book for my library, and then reads the whole thing cover to cover. Brendan Gregg formerly of NetFlix has contributed significantly to the world of observability and uses his experience in troubleshooting and tracing some…