Intro to Observability

In this talk I give a brief introduction to observability, what it is, why it is important, and how to get started with it. I also discuss the differences between observability and monitoring, and how they can be used together to improve the reliability and performance of your systems.

This talk also has a demo where I show how to use Prometheus, Loki and Grafana to monitor a simple web server.

How to run

To run the demo, you will need to have Docker and Docker Compose installed on your machine. You can then run the following command:

docker compose up

This will start a simple web server, Prometheus, Loki and Grafana. You can then access the web server at http://localhost:5050, Prometheus at http://localhost:9090, and Grafana at http://localhost:3000. Grafana is already configured to use Prometheus and Loki as a data source, and has a dashboard that shows relevant data from both sources.

You can use ping_endpoints1.sh and ping_endpoints2.sh to generate traffic to the web server, allowing you to see the metrics in Prometheus and the logs in both Loki and Grafana.