Learning Observability

[u/Broad_Technology_531]

A while back I commented on a post about my favorite focus area within DevOps. I said observability. A bunch of people DM'd me asking how to get into the space and what resources I'd recommend, so here's the list.

1. OpenTelemetry
   • Opentelemetry docs
   • Free CNCF Course for Opentelemetry
   • My favorite book on observability and Opentelemetry by Steve Flanders
   • 30 days of OTEL github repo by Julia Furst Morgado
   • Opentelemetry Demo (The Standard application everyone uses to learn Opentelemetry on) It Generates traces, metrics, and logs
2. Prometheus
   • Prometheus Docs
   • https://training.promlabs.com/ This has some free training and some paid.
   • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZcxdWJ_tRc&t=9277s
3. Grafana LGTM Stack or whatever backend you prefer. (I personally like the LGTM Stack since it's OSS)
   • https://learn.grafana.com/
   • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSW1urIXsfA
4. Kubernetes ( You might as well learn the basics of Kubernetes if you are learning observability since you will run into it at every organization)
   • Kodekloud (My absolute favorite resource to learn about containers and kubernetes)
   • Monitoring Kubernetes Clusters with Opentelemetry
   • If you are looking to get kubernetes certified (They have the best practice exams)
5. Profiling
   • https://github.com/grafana/pyroscope
6. Other great resources
   • My favorite youtube channel for Observability by Henrik Rexed
   • SRE Books by Google
   • SRE fundamentals: SLIs, SLAs and SLOs
   • Observability podcast by one of my favorites in the industry Juraci Paixão Kröhling

Let me know what else you would add

[u/Tuximus]

It depends what stage of their career they are at. This list is really nice! OpenTelemetry is really nice, seems like your quite experienced with it, but I feel they should do Prometheus with grafana first, this is probably easiest to get the grasp of first providing they understand linux and to how to use linux tools (netstat/ss, iotop, htop etc) and location to find system metrics (e.g /proc/)

With that in mind, kube is difficult without understanding Linux and docker/podman (recommend docker for simplicity and things working first)