1.

Observability and Telemetry Tools

a. Prometheus

• Overview: Prometheus is an open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit widely

used for collecting time-series data such as metrics from applications, systems,
and services.
• Experience:
o I’ve used Prometheus for monitoring the performance of microservices,
particularly in Kubernetes-based environments. Prometheus collects
metrics like request counts, error rates, latency, and CPU/memory usage.
o Prometheus Alerting: I have configured Prometheus Alertmanager to
trigger alerts based on thresholds (e.g., high response time, high error rates)
and send notifications via Slack, email, or other channels.
o Grafana Integration: I integrated Prometheus with Grafana for visualizing
metrics in real-time, creating dashboards that track the health of various
microservices, databases, and infrastructure components.
• Example:
o Exposed application metrics via HTTP endpoints (/metrics) in a Spring Boot
app using Micrometer, a metrics library that integrates with Prometheus.
o Set up Prometheus scrapers to collect metrics and visualize them in
Grafana.
yaml
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# Prometheus configuration
scrape_configs:
- job_name: 'spring-boot-app'
static_configs:
- targets: ['<app_host>:8080']

b. OpenTelemetry

• Overview: OpenTelemetry is a set of APIs, libraries, agents, and instrumentation to

provide observability by collecting distributed traces, metrics, and logs from
applications.
• Experience:
 o I’ve implemented OpenTelemetry in distributed systems to gather telemetry
data, such as distributed traces and metrics, to understand how requests
flow through different services.
o Tracing: Used OpenTelemetry's distributed tracing capabilities to trace
requests across microservices (e.g., from a front-end service to a back-end
service) and identify latency bottlenecks and service dependencies.
o Integration with Jaeger or Zipkin: I used OpenTelemetry with Jaeger and
Zipkin for visualizing traces in distributed systems to understand service
latencies and diagnose issues related to performance bottlenecks.
• Example (Java + Spring Boot + OpenTelemetry):

java
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// Add OpenTelemetry dependencies to Spring Boot app
implementation 'io.opentelemetry:opentelemetry-api:1.5.0'
implementation 'io.opentelemetry:opentelemetry-sdk:1.5.0'

// Example of creating a span for tracing

Span span = tracer.spanBuilder("processing-request").startSpan();
try (Scope scope = span.makeCurrent()) {
// Business logic here
} finally {
span.end();
}

c. Datadog

• Overview: Datadog is a cloud-based observability platform that provides full-stack

monitoring, including infrastructure, application, log, and user monitoring. It
supports monitoring of cloud applications, databases, servers, and services.
• Experience:
o I have used Datadog for comprehensive monitoring of both infrastructure
and application performance, including real-time logs, APM (Application
Performance Monitoring), and metrics.
o APM: Integrated Datadog APM to track request traces and analyze the
performance of various services, including latency, error rates, and
throughput.
 o Logs: Configured log forwarding to Datadog from various services (e.g.,
application logs, Nginx, database logs) for detailed analysis and
troubleshooting.
• Example:
o Set up Datadog agents on EC2 instances to collect metrics and logs.
o Used Datadog Dashboards to create custom visualizations for application
performance (e.g., average response time, error rate, database query times).

d. ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana)

• Overview: The ELK Stack is a popular collection of tools used for search, analysis,
and visualization of log data.
• Experience:
o Elasticsearch: I have used Elasticsearch as a log aggregation and storage
solution, enabling fast searching and analysis of logs across distributed
systems.
o Logstash: Used Logstash to collect, filter, and transform logs from various
sources (e.g., application logs, system logs) and forward them to
Elasticsearch.
o Kibana: I used Kibana for visualizing and analyzing logs, creating
dashboards that display application logs, request traces, and error patterns
in a user-friendly way.
• Example:
o Configured a Logstash pipeline to collect logs from application servers and
send them to Elasticsearch:
yaml
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input {
file {
path => "/var/log/app/*.log"
start_position => "beginning"
}
}
filter {
grok {
match => { "message" => "%{COMBINEDAPACHELOG}" }
}
}
output {
elasticsearch {
hosts => ["http://localhost:9200"]
index => "app-logs-%{+YYYY.MM.dd}"
}
}

e. New Relic

• Overview: New Relic is an observability platform that provides full-stack

monitoring, including APM, infrastructure monitoring, logs, and user interactions.
• Experience:
o I used New Relic APM to monitor the performance of Java applications,
gaining insights into transaction times, error rates, and database
performance.
o Integrated New Relic Logs to centralize logs from various microservices and
applications, making it easy to correlate logs with APM data for deeper
insights.
o Set up custom events and custom metrics in New Relic to track specific
business KPIs or application-level metrics.
• Example:
o Used New Relic agent to instrument a Spring Boot application and start
collecting APM data:
xml
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<dependency>
<groupId>com.newrelic.agent.java</groupId>
<artifactId>newrelic-api</artifactId>
<version>5.8.0</version>
</dependency>
2. Monitoring Tools

a. Nagios

• Overview: Nagios is an open-source monitoring system that focuses on monitoring

the health of servers, network devices, and applications.
• Experience:
o Used Nagios for monitoring system resources such as CPU usage, memory,
disk space, and uptime.
o Configured Nagios plugins to monitor critical system services (e.g., web
servers, database servers) and set up alerts for failures or resource
threshold violations.
• Example:
o Set up custom Nagios checks to monitor database health and send email
notifications if certain thresholds (e.g., high CPU usage) were exceeded.

b. Zabbix

• Overview: Zabbix is an open-source monitoring tool for networks and applications.

It offers real-time monitoring and visualization for system and network
performance.
• Experience:
o I used Zabbix for monitoring infrastructure components like servers, network
devices, and databases, with customizable thresholds and alerts.
o Set up Zabbix agents to monitor the health of applications, databases, and
other services and send alerts to the team when thresholds are breached.
• Example:
o Configured Zabbix templates to monitor AWS EC2 instances and integrate
with external services like Redis and MySQL.

c. Grafana

• Overview: Grafana is a powerful open-source platform for monitoring and

observability, used primarily for creating dashboards based on time-series data
collected from different data sources like Prometheus, InfluxDB, or Elasticsearch.
• Experience:
 o Integrated Grafana with Prometheus to create custom dashboards for
monitoring application metrics, including response times, error rates, and
server CPU utilization.
o Used Grafana Alerts to notify the team when critical thresholds (e.g., error
rates, high latency) were breached.
• Example:
o Created a Grafana dashboard to visualize application metrics collected
from Prometheus, using query expressions like
rate(http_requests_total[1m]).

3. Log Aggregation and Analysis

a. Fluentd

• Overview: Fluentd is a log collector and aggregator used for centralizing logs and
forwarding them to various destinations like Elasticsearch, Kafka, or cloud-based
solutions.
• Experience:
o I configured Fluentd to aggregate logs from multiple services and send them
to Elasticsearch for indexing, making it easier to search, analyze, and
visualize log data in Kibana.

b. Sentry

• Overview: Sentry is a popular tool for error tracking and real-time crash reporting.
• Experience:
o Integrated Sentry with web and mobile applications to capture and track
errors in real-time.
o Used Sentry’s rich error context (e.g., stack traces, request data) to identify
and fix production issues quickly.

Summary

My experience with telemetry and monitoring tools covers a wide range of platforms and
technologies used for tracking system health, application performance, and logs in both
real-time and over time. These tools have allowed me to monitor, diagnose, and optimize
applications, ensuring they remain highly available, responsive, and resilient to failures.
Whether it's through traditional infrastructure monitoring, application performance
monitoring (APM), or distributed tracing, I have employed a combination of solutions like
Prometheus, Datadog, Grafana, New Relic, OpenTelemetry, and Elastic Stack to
provide end-to-end observability across various environments.