Timescale Newsletter Roundup: May 2022
Welcome to another newsletter roundup; glad to see you!
In this issue, you will find new blog posts on automatically instrumenting Kubernetes apps using OpenTelemetry and the PostgreSQL community, you can listen to the insights of our co-founder, Ajay Kulkarni, on the Open Source Podcast, and take a deep dive with us on all things metrics.
Plus, tips for growing your developer career and an introduction to a bunch of new cool features of Promscale, our observability backend powered by SQL.
Scroll down for a full snapshot of the content we shared with our readers this month (and don't forget to subscribe to get updates straight to your inbox).
New Technical Content, Videos & Updates
[Read] Point-in-Time PostgreSQL Database and Query Monitoring With pg_stat_statements
Database monitoring is crucial for effective data management and building high-performance applications—cue in pg_stat_statements. In our first article about this PostgreSQL extension, we showed you how you could enable it. Our latest blog post guides you on avoiding one of its pitfalls to suit all your database monitoring needs.
- ✍ Check out how you can transform cumulative data on your database performance into time-series data by regularly storing snapshots of the metrics.
[Read] Teaching Elephants to Fish
Drawing inspiration from his keynote talk at the PGConf NYC last year in New York, Timescale’s director of developer advocacy, Ryan Booz, reflects on the PostgreSQL community and suggests five ways to improve it.
- ✍ Read our blog post to learn how you can lead your community with curiosity and empathy.
[Watch] PostgreSQL Aggregation: How to Create and Use Custom Aggregates
Are you still struggling with PostgreSQL aggregation? Join us in this course on the Foundations of PostgreSQL and TimescaleDB! In our 5th class, we’ll look at everything from functions (transition and final functions), extensions and object creation hooks, developing PostgreSQL extensions in Rust, and more.
[Watch] Data on Kubernetes Talks #126
See how you can automatically instrument Kubernetes apps using OpenTelemetry (without even changing your code!) in this fun talk where Bart Farrell, the incredible Data on Kubernetes’ head of community, welcomed our thunder from down under a.k.a. developer advocate, James Blackwood-Sewell.
[Read] A Deep Dive Into OpenTelemetry Metrics
Learn more about the philosophy behind them, how OTel turns Measurements into Metrics, and the six types of Instruments you can use to capture Measurements.
- ✍ Check out the second part of our series on OTel Metrics and revisit our first blog post on Prometheus metrics.
[Read] Five Lessons for Managing Growth and Career Development in Software Companies
Managing your career growth and development in software companies can be tricky. Drawing from personal experience and based on his talk earlier this year at the Postgres Conference in Silicon Valley, our VP of Engineering, Chad Berkley, shares five lessons for healthy and productive organizations.
- 📚 Read Chad’s five takeaways to grow your career (spoiler alert: 🍕 and 🌭 may be involved).
[Listen] Open Source Startup Podcast E30
A big shout out to our friends from the Open Source Startup Podcast for having us on their show! Hosts Robby and Tim chatted to our co-founder and CEO, Ajay Kulkarni, about TimescaleDB, our 8,000+ Slack community 🙌 and how we raised over $180 million from investors.
[Read] Observability Powered by SQL: Understand Your Systems Like Never Before With OpenTelemetry Traces and PostgreSQL
You can now access telemetry data and interrogate it with random questions (and get results back in real time) using a good old open-source SQL database. Yeah, we did that. 💪 But wait, there’s more: our latest blog post introduces you to pre-built Grafana dashboards that you can integrate into your Grafana instance for immediate post-deployment insights.
- ✍ Our VP of Observability, Ramon Guiu, tells you all about OpenTelemetry tracing support in Promscale and using SQL for observability.
- Check out our pre-built dashboard on GitHub and read our documentation for details on how to import the dashboards into Grafana.
- 👉 Install Promscale now (it’s free!).
[Update] No-Fuss Alerting: Introducing Prometheus Alerts in Promscale
Do you set alerts in Prometheus to keep track of your systems? Of course you do. Well, you can now use the same standard to define alerts directly within Promscale using PromQL queries.
- 📚 Timescale’s developer advocate, James Blackwood-Sewell, shows you how in our latest blog post.
[Update] Get Down(sampled) With Prometheus Recording Rules in Promscale
You can now configure Recording Rules directly in Promscale using PromQL—and the same configuration file you would use in Prometheus. 🥳 In our new blog post, we walk you through the configuration of Recording Rules in Promscale to get the most of them as a downsampling mechanism.
- ✍ Learn how to configure Recording Rules in Promscale.
- 📚 See a Recording Rule in action in our GitHub repository.
[Watch] SQL Tricks of an Application DBA
Database administrators have been sharing their rules of thumb with each other for years. In our latest Timescale Community Day, we were lucky to welcome software developer and tech lead Haki Benita, who compiled all his essential tips into one talk.
Where We Were
[Event] o11yfest 2022 (May 9-12, Virtual)
Watch two presentations with the Timescale touch: Easing OpenTelemetry Adoption Using the OpenTelemetry Operator, by product manager Vineeth Pothulapati, and Going Deep Into the (Mis)Behaviors of Your Distributed Systems with OpenTelemetry and SQL, by Ramon Guiu, VP of Observability.
[Event] PostgreSQL Conference Germany (May 13, Leipzig)
One year of lessons in just one session: join Timescale’s senior engineer Oleksii Kliukin as he shares what his team has learned from running a managed PostgreSQL/TimescaleDB service on Kubernetes on AWS for little more than 12 months.
[Event] PrometheusDay Europe 2022 (May 17, Valencia, Spain)
Metrics fanatics, unite! On this day dedicated to observability and the Prometheus community, the Timescale Team delivered not one, not two, but three talks 🎉, including a keynote.
[Event] Write the Docs Portland 2022 (May 22-24, Virtual)
Timescale’s technical writer, Lana Brindley, was at the event on May 23 to provide tips on building and growing a docs team. Watch her talk, where she shared her 17-year experience in documentation management, and get into the specifics of building a docs team—tools and workflow organization included.
Wrapping Up
And that concludes this month’s newsletter roundup. We’ll continue to release new content, events, and more—posting monthly updates for everyone.
If you’d like to get updates as soon as they’re available, subscribe to our newsletter (2x monthly emails, prepared with 💛 and no fluff or jargon, promise).
Happy building!
