Observability

What Is Distributed Tracing and How Jaeger Tracing Is Solving Its Challenges

15 Dec 2022 13 min read

The Jaeger Service Performance Monitoring (SPM) feature offers a new approach to distributed tracing, taking Jaeger from a troubleshooting tool to one that proactively monitors your services.

How to Turn Timescale Into an Observability Backend With Promscale

14 Dec 2022 15 min read

Learn everything you need to know about how to integrate Timescale Cloud and Promscale with a Kubernetes-based system, including how to optimally configure Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Grafana, and Jaeger, and how you can use SQL to analyze your metrics and traces.

Using PostgreSQL as a Scalable, Durable, and Reliable Storage for Jaeger Tracing

26 Oct 2022 10 min read

Elasticsearch and Cassandra have traditionally been the only two databases recommended to store Jaeger traces in production. Learn how you can now use PostgreSQL as a certified, durable, reliable storage for Jaeger with Promscale.

Prometheus vs. OpenTelemetry Metrics: A Complete Guide

7 Jul 2022 14 min read

What are the differences between Prometheus and OpenTelemetry metrics? When to use one or the other? And how to convert between both standards?

How Prometheus Querying Works (and Why You Should Care)

8 Jun 2022 8 min read

Learn how Prometheus indexing works to understand your PromQL queries perform the way they do—and get some tips to achieve faster results.

OpenTelemetry: Where the SQL Is Better Than the Original

25 May 2022 5 min read

How does OpenTelemetry differ from previous observability tools? And can these differences open a new path to an old friend as a unified query language for telemetry data?

Kubernetes Observability in One Command: How to Generate and Store OpenTelemetry Traces Automatically

20 May 2022 9 min read

Instrumenting your code with OpenTelemetry traces is a manual effort that requires considerable time and effort. With tobs, OpenTelemetry Operator, and Promscale, you can deploy—with a single command— a complete pre-configured observability stack in Kubernetes.

How We Built Alert Rules, Runbooks, and Dashboards to Observe Our Observability Tool

19 May 2022 9 min read

The latest Promscale release comes with a set of alert rules, runbooks, and a dashboard that encapsulates the team’s best practices to monitor and troubleshoot Promscale.

Get Down(sampled) With Prometheus Recording Rules in Promscale

18 May 2022 4 min read

You can now configure Recording Rules directly in Promscale using PromQL and the same configuration file you would use in Prometheus!

No-Fuss Alerting: Introducing Prometheus Alerts in Promscale

17 May 2022 4 min read

Promscale now supports Prometheus alerting! You can directly configure Promscale alerts using PromQL queries to get notified when any of your metrics goes off, helping you identify anomalies early.

Observability Powered by SQL: Understand Your Systems Like Never Before With OpenTelemetry Traces and PostgreSQL

16 May 2022 13 min read

Learn how observability powered by SQL can help you unveil performance issues in your distributed systems, courtesy of the now generally available OpenTelemetry tracing support in Promscale.

A Deep Dive Into OpenTelemetry Metrics

10 May 2022 11 min read

An introduction to the OpenTelemetry metrics standard. This post is the second of a three-part series on all things metrics.

A Deep Dive Into the Four Types of Prometheus Metrics

14 Apr 2022 13 min read

In this introduction to the different open-source metrics standards, we focus on the Prometheus metric types. This post is the first of a three-part series on all things metrics.

OpenTelemetry and Python: A Complete Instrumentation Guide

23 Mar 2022 15 min read

Learn how to instrument Python code with OpenTelemetry, both manually and using auto-instrumentation.

Learn OpenTelemetry Tracing With This Lightweight Microservices Demo

24 Feb 2022 26 min read

Deploy this simple microservices demo and learn how to get unprecedented insights about your systems! The demo application is instrumented with OpenTelemetry, and it includes six powerful Grafana dashboards built with traces and SQL.

A Different and (Often) Better Way to Downsample Your Prometheus Metrics

22 Oct 2021 15 min read

A better option for downsampling Prometheus metrics, enabling developers to do accurate and flexible trend analysis on those metrics over long periods of time with high performance and reduced storage costs.

What Are Traces, and How SQL (Yes, SQL) and OpenTelemetry Can Help Us Get More Value Out of Traces to Build Better Software

11 Oct 2021 25 min read

Promscale, the observability backend powered by SQL, now includes support for collecting traces via OpenTelemetry in beta.

Simplified Prometheus monitoring for your entire organization with Promscale

18 Aug 2021 11 min read

We’re excited to announce multi-tenancy support in Promscale. We’ve built Promscale as a centralized store for metrics, and now developers can enjoy the same operational maturity and query flexibility when storing metrics across their entire organization.

Promscale 0.4: Drawing Inspiration from Cortex to Rewrite Support for Prometheus High-Availability

How to Successfully Migrate From Jaeger to OpenTelemetry Tracing