Why You Can’t Afford to Ignore Distributed Tracing for Observability

Observability is a hot topic, but not a lot of people know what it truly means. Everyone reads about monitoring vs. observability these days, and I have had the chance to experience what I think is the main concept behind this movement.

First of all, monitoring is complicated. Dashboards don't scale because they usually reveal the information you need until only after an outage is experienced, and, at some point, looking for spikes in your graphs becomes a straining eye exercise. And that's not monitoring, it is just a "not very" smart way to understand how something isn't working. In other words, monitoring is just the tip of the iceberg where the solid foundation is the knowledge you have of your system.

Flux Windowing and Aggregation

Today, we’re talking about queries. Specifically, we’re talking about Flux queries, the new language being developed at InfluxData. You can read about why we decided to write Flux and check out the technical preview of Flux.

If you’re an InfluxDB user, you’re probably using InfluxQL to write your queries, and you can keep writing it as long as you want. However, if you’re looking for an alternative or you’ve hit some of the boundaries of InfluxQL, it’s time to start learning Flux.