July 07, 2017
Demystifying Production-Ready Apps on Kubernetes with Carter Morgan
The Weave Online User Group talk given by Carter Morgan defines of what a "production-ready" cloud application looks like.
May 23, 2017
The Long Tail: Tools to Investigate High Long Tail Latency
Figuring out what's causing slow requests or ops can be tricky. Tom Wilkie shares the tools he used to investigate high long tail latency.
May 16, 2017
Kubernetes Rolling Upgrades One by One
Have a semi-stateful service running on Kubernetes and want to do rolling upgrades? Tom Wilkie outlines how to make deployments upgrade one by one.
May 13, 2017
The RED Method: key metrics for microservices architecture
Tom Wilkie shares Weaveworks monitoring philosophy and the three most important metrics to use in your microservices architecture.
May 05, 2017
WebSockets Are Evil and Must Die
In previous blog posts I’ve mention my dislike for WebSockets. In this quick blog post I attempt to explain why. Unfortunately I think this raises more questions than it answers!Be aware, these opinions are my own.It’s the monitoring,...
May 01, 2017
Prometheus UI: DIY with David Kaltschmidt from KubeCon Europe 2017
At KubeCon Europe 2017, Weaveworks Director of Software Engineering, UI/UX, David Kaltschmidt gave a presentation titled “Grafana is Not Enough: DIY User Interfaces for Prometheus.” In this talk, he discussed the Prometheus UI.What’s...
April 28, 2017
Loki: Distributed Tracing Zipkin/Prometheus Mashup with Tom Wilkie
Weaveworks Director of Software Engineering Tom Wilkie was busy at CloudNativeCon + KubeCon Europe 2017. Between showing off Cubienetes and presenting browser metrics in Prometheus, he found time to discuss one of his personal projects....
April 27, 2017
Weave Cloud UI Alerts and Metrics
After a particularly egregious outage was reported by a Weave Cloud user, we decided it would be a good idea to add some alerting to our front-end codebase. Alerting and metrics for Weave Cloud are handled using Prometheus, however, which...
April 21, 2017
Introduction to Prometheus Monitoring
Prometheus monitoring Prometheus is open source monitoring software that treats time series data as a data source for generating precise alerts. Now part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, the project began at SoundCloud in 2012. As...
April 19, 2017
Getting Browser Metrics into Prometheus: Tom Wilkie KubeCon Recap
During KubeCon, our Director of Software Engineering Tom Wilkie gave a presentation called “Behind the Iron Curtain: Getting Metrics From the Browser into Prometheus.”The idea Previously, Prometheus has been pigeon-holed as a monitoring...
April 10, 2017
PromQL queries for the rest of us
Prometheus comes with its own query language called PromQL. It’s very powerful and easily allows you to filter with the multi-dimensional time-series labels that make Prometheus so great. But it can be daunting when you are faced with an...
March 13, 2017
Of Metrics and Middleware
The topic of how the services in Weave Cloud are instrumented came up in two discussions this week, so I thought I’d write a short blog post explaining all the moving parts.Instrumenting RequestsFor all services in Weave Cloud, we measure...
March 06, 2017
Prometheus, ConfigMaps and Continuous Deployment
This is the story of how we manage our Prometheus config to avoid restarting Prometheus too often, losing all our history. It is a short, up to date write up of a talk I gave at the first London Prometheus meetup. In the beginning there...
March 01, 2017
Running Consul on Kubernetes and Monitoring it With Prometheus
We run a couple of replicated Consul services for Weave Cloud: one acts as a coordinator for the distributed WebSocket router backing Scope’s terminals feature, and the other for storing the state of Cortex’s consistent hash ring. This...
February 27, 2017
Aggregating Pod resource (CPU, memory) usage by arbitrary labels with Prometheus
How would you answer the questions like “how much CPU is my service consuming?” using Prometheus and Kubernetes? In this quick post, I’ll show you how… First we need to think about where to get the information from. cAdvisor (from Google)...
February 24, 2017
Turtles all the way down: HTTP over gRPC
I recently introduced a new mechanism for AuthFE (out authenticating reverse-proxy frontend for Weave Cloud) to forward requests to downstream services: HTTP over gRPC. This blog post covers why on earth I did this, and why you might want...
January 17, 2017
Cloud Provider Options for a Container-Friendly Environment
The advent Docker and containers, has simplified packaging, deploying and supporting applications. However, with this advancement come challenges, as you also need a robust environment in which to deploy the containers. And that requires...
January 11, 2017
Dashboards as Code with Grafana
If you use Prometheus, then you probably use Grafana. At Weave, we have Grafana dashboards for all of our microservices. When we want to understand our system, our Grafana dashboards are the first things we look at. To make the most out of...
November 03, 2016
Join Weaveworks at KubeCon Seattle + CloudNativeCon
KubeCon Seattle is Almost Here KubeCon Seattle is just around the corner and we hope to see you there Nov. 8-9. If you’re not familiar with KubeCon Seattle, the two-day event brings together thousands of Kubernetes technologists to hear...
October 17, 2016
Weave Mesh in Prometheus Alertmanager
tl;dr: Weave Mesh, an open-source gossip and CRDT communications library, gave the Prometheus Alertmanager exactly what it needed to be reliable and highly-available.As a former SoundCloud engineer, I’ve had the privilege of using...