Cloud Native Monitoring

Chapter 5. Building Great Metrics Functions

To give you more ideas on how to build a great metrics function, we’ve compiled some tips and tricks in this final chapter.

Out-of-the-Box Standard Instrumentation and Dashboarding

Life is increasingly complex in the DevOps world. Software engineers are expected to do much more than write code: we productionize applications, architect and build systems, make everything compatible across the organization, and ensure that everything we make follows standards.

Thanks to open source tools like Envoy and NGINX, though, SRE teams and software engineers can enable standardized metrics and dashboards right out of the box. For example, if you’re collecting Prometheus metrics with Envoy or NGINX, you can give any HTTP-based application a Grafana dashboard. If you need organization-specific metrics, such as for sales on a specific API, you can build a sales dashboard for use by any team that implements the API. You can even create a RED (Request Rate, Request Error, Request Duration) metrics dashboard out of the box, so that your software engineers can observe and monitor these customized, prebuilt applications without needing to learn PromQL or add intrusive instrumentation to their code.

Rely on your software engineers or SRE/observability teams to help you build and create standardized dashboards. They know the organizational context better than any vendor. For example, if your organization relies heavily on Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs), ...