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Last9 Engineering

Posts about code, practices and experience of building Last9

Think Data Warehouse, NOT Database.

Think Data Warehouse, NOT Database.

The software monitoring world is broken because of a TSDB. We deserve a TSDW

Aniket Rao

What needs to change in software monitoring?

What needs to change in software monitoring?

A wishlist of things that need to change in the world of software monitoring

Aniket Rao

Back to the Future: The R-C-A of alerting

Back to the Future: The R-C-A of alerting

Dissecting the RCA of Alerting - Reliability, Correlations, Actionability

Aditya Godbole

Software Monitoring — Stuck in the 00s

Software Monitoring — Stuck in the 00s

A short history of software monitoring, from the 00s. What has changed? Why are things so arcane?

Piyush Verma

Why your monitoring costs are high

Why your monitoring costs are high

If you want to bring down your monitoring costs, you need to shake up a decision paralysis in engineering

Aniket Rao

The unresolved cost of High Cardinality

The unresolved cost of High Cardinality

Fulfill all your food delivery orders this December 31st by taming High Cardinality data with Levitate 😉

Prathamesh Sonpatki

Why you need a Time Series Data Warehouse

Why you need a Time Series Data Warehouse

What is a Time Series Data Warehouse? How does it help in your monitoring journey? How does it differ from a Time Series Database? That and more

Rishi Agrawal

Real-Time Canary Deployment Tracking with Argo CD & Levitate Change Events

Real-Time Canary Deployment Tracking with Argo CD & Levitate Change Events

Use Levitate's powerful change events to track success of canary rollouts via ArgoCD

Preeti Dewani

Monitor Google Cloud Functions using Pushgateway and Levitate

Monitor Google Cloud Functions using Pushgateway and Levitate

How to monitor serverless async jobs from Google Cloud Functions with Prometheus Pushgateway and Levitate using the push model

Aniket Rao

Golang Concurrency Masterclass by Swati Modi at Gophercon 2023

Golang Concurrency Masterclass by Swati Modi at Gophercon 2023

Talk on Golang Concurrency Masterclass by Swati Modi at Gophercon 2023

Last9

Do more with your metrics by Piyush Verma at GopherConIndia 2022

Do more with your metrics by Piyush Verma at GopherConIndia 2022

Piyush Verma's talk at GopherCon India 2022 on Do More with Your Metrics with Last9 and Levitate

Last9

Unwiring High Cardinality - SRE Day 2023

Unwiring High Cardinality - SRE Day 2023

Report from SRE Day 2023, where Piyush Verma - CTO Last9, gave a talk on Unwiring High Cardinality

Last9

How to restart Kubernetes Pods with kubectl

How to restart Kubernetes Pods with kubectl

A simple reckoner on how to restart a Kubernetes pod with kubectl

Anjali Udasi

Levitate: Last9’s Managed TSDB Now on AWS Marketplace

Levitate: Last9’s Managed TSDB Now on AWS Marketplace

Levitate - Last9's managed Prometheus Compatible TSDB is available on AWS Marketplace

Prathamesh Sonpatki

PromQL Macros in Levitate

PromQL Macros in Levitate

Define PromQL Macros to standardize complex PromQL queries in Levitate

Prathamesh Sonpatki

GCP Managed Service For Prometheus vs. Levitate

GCP Managed Service For Prometheus vs. Levitate

A detailed comparison of Levitate and Google Managed Prometheus - Cost, Scale and Ease of Use

Prathamesh Sonpatki

A case for Observability outside engineering teams

A case for Observability outside engineering teams

Observability is being built by engineers for engineers. In reality, o11y is for all.

Aniket Rao

Understanding the Rasmussen model for failures

Understanding the Rasmussen model for failures

What does the Rasmussen model teach us about Site Reliability Engineering?

Nishant Modak

How we tame High Cardinality by Sharding a stream

How we tame High Cardinality by Sharding a stream

Using 'Sharding' to tame High Cardinality data for Levitate - Our Time Series Data Warehouse

Piyush Verma

1979, a nuclear accident and SRE

1979, a nuclear accident and SRE

Deep diving into the 'Normal accident' theory by Charles Perrow, and what it means for SREs

Aniket Rao

How we tame high cardinality in time series databases

How we tame high cardinality in time series databases

Engineering innovation to solve high cardinality with Levitate - a multi-part series

Piyush Verma, Swati Modi

OpenTelemetry for dummies: ELI5

OpenTelemetry for dummies: ELI5

What is OpenTelemetry? Why is it important? Do SREs need to adopt OTel? An Explain It Like I'm 5.

Mohan Dutt Parashar

What Site Reliability Engineering needs — A swarm of rogue bees

What Site Reliability Engineering needs — A swarm of rogue bees

If all companies are software companies, all companies need better Observability to understand how performative their software is

Aniket Rao

Take back control of your Monitoring

Take back control of your Monitoring

Take back control of your Monitoring with Levitate - a managed time series data warehouse

Nishant Modak

Observability is a practice, not a job

Observability is a practice, not a job

Engineering organizations that ship fast have Observability as part of their core DNA.

Aniket Rao

Streaming Aggregation vs Recording Rules

Streaming Aggregation vs Recording Rules

Streaming Aggregation and Recording Rules are two ways to tame High Cardinality. What are they? Why do we need them? How are they different?

Last9

Using a Golang package in Python using Gopy

Using a Golang package in Python using Gopy

Using Golang package in Python using Gopy: A simple way to leverage the power of Golang packages in Python applications.

Arjun Mahishi

High Cardinality for Dummies: ELI5

High Cardinality for Dummies: ELI5

High Cardinality woes are far & frequent in today's modern cloud-native environment. What does it mean, & why is it such a pressing problem?

Mohan Dutt Parashar

Who should define Reliability —  Engineering, or Product?

Who should define Reliability — Engineering, or Product?

Whoever owns Reliability should define its parameters. But who owns the Reliability of a Product? Engineering? Product Management? Or the Customer success team?

Piyush Verma

Observability—OSS vs Paid vs Managed OSS

Observability—OSS vs Paid vs Managed OSS

The Reliability industry needs a managed, non-vendor lock-in answer to spiraling costs, high cardinality and the toil of managing a tsdb

Satyajeet Jadhav

Learnings integrating jmxtrans

Learnings integrating jmxtrans

JMX metrics give solid insights into the workings of your application. Integrating them with Levitate (our time series data warehosue) required us to jump some hoops with vmagent.

Saurabh Hirani

The neglected tech arctic winter — Internal SaaS expenses

The neglected tech arctic winter — Internal SaaS expenses

The current tech winter reveals a hard truth: spending on internal tools for tech infrastructure is bloated—and this isn't just a passing cycle.

Nishant Modak

Understanding “Cricket Scale”

Understanding “Cricket Scale”

How does a DevOps/Site Reliability Engineer plan for "Cricket scale"? How do you warm systems' about to witness 30+ million concurrent users?

Aniket Rao

What is MTBI?

What is MTBI?

Everything you need to know about Mean Time Between Incidents (MTBI) and how it can help Site Reliability Engineers

Last9

Rethinking Anomaly Detection: Focus on business outcomes

Rethinking Anomaly Detection: Focus on business outcomes

From the trenches at Games24x7 — Sanjay, on how Reliability engineering should drive core business metrics

Sanjay Singh

Observability is dead, long live observability

Observability is dead, long live observability

No tool can magically offer you 99.999s. Observability is largely about the basics. And basics are boring. But, boring is hard. Boring is battle tested.

Aniket Rao

Self-managed Prometheus vs Managed Prometheus

Self-managed Prometheus vs Managed Prometheus

What are the differences between Self-managed Prometheus vs Managed prometheus? How do you choose what works for you?

Last9

The importance of structured communication in the world of SRE

The importance of structured communication in the world of SRE

How you communicate helps build your 9s. In the world of Site Reliability Engineering, this is crucial. How do you do it?

Saurabh Hirani

The difference between DevOps, SRE, and Platform Engineering

The difference between DevOps, SRE, and Platform Engineering

In reliability engineering, three concepts keep getting talked about - DevOps, SRE and Platform Engineering. How do they differ?

Prathamesh Sonpatki

Golang's Stringer tool

Golang's Stringer tool

Learn about how to use, extend and auto-generate Stringer tool of Golang

Arjun Mahishi

How to improve Prometheus remote write performance at scale

How to improve Prometheus remote write performance at scale

Deep dive into how to improve the performance of Prometheus Remote Write at Scale based on real-life experiences

Saurabh Hirani

Prometheus vs InfluxDB

Prometheus vs InfluxDB

What are the differences between Prometheus and InfluxDB - use cases, challenges, advantages and how you should go about choosing the right tsdb

Last9

India vs Pakistan: SRE and the Shannon Limit

India vs Pakistan: SRE and the Shannon Limit

How does one ‘detect change’ in a complex infrastructure, so you don’t lose out on critical revenues — A short SRE story

Satyajeet Jadhav

Battling Alert Fatigue

Battling Alert Fatigue

What is Alert Fatigue and techniques to reduce it

Last9

SLOs, SLIs, and SLAs: Understanding Key Service Metrics

SLOs, SLIs, and SLAs: Understanding Key Service Metrics

A guide to set practical Service Level Objectives (SLOs) & Service Level Indicators (SLIs) for your Site Reliability Engineering practices.

Last9

Kubernetes Monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana

Kubernetes Monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana

A guide to help you implement Prometheus and Grafana in your Kubernetes cluster

Last9

Why We Auto-Delete Slack Messages at Last9

Why We Auto-Delete Slack Messages at Last9

At Last9, we auto-delete Slack DMs after 2 days. This pushes teams to improve documentation, reduce tribal knowledge, and own accountability.

Nishant Modak

Static Threshold vs. Dynamic Threshold Alerting

Static Threshold vs. Dynamic Threshold Alerting

What's the difference between Static Threshold vs Dynamic Threshold Alerting? Do you really know when and how to use each threshold type?

Last9

How we won Dukaan over

How we won Dukaan over

5 meetings. 1 month. Subhash and his team’s velocity on decision-making, moving fast, and radical candor, are a breath of fresh air in the Indian startup ecosystem.

Aniket Rao

How to calculate HTTP content-length metrics on cli

How to calculate HTTP content-length metrics on cli

A simple guide to crunch numbers for understanding overall HTTP content length metrics.

Saurabh Hirani

Choosing Effective SLIs

Choosing Effective SLIs

Practical advice to choose an effective SLI.

Akshay Chugh

Running a Database on EC2 is Slowing It Down

Running a Database on EC2 is Slowing It Down

Learn everything about the advantages of EC2, it's use cases and how to optimize EC2 further.

Jayesh Bapu Ahire, Akshay Chugh

Doing SRE the Right Way!

Doing SRE the Right Way!

A well-thought-out approach to SRE, which will help site reliability engineers and software engineers develop and maintain a useful, consistent, and effective SRE strategy for their products!

Piyush Verma

Microservices - Tracking Dependencies

Microservices - Tracking Dependencies

Quick primer into microservices architecture and the importance of tracking dependencies

Akshay Chugh, Jayesh Bapu Ahire

SLOs eased

SLOs eased

You can either love running or hate running, but you will definitely love this analogy - take a fresh look at SLOs!

Piyush Verma, Saurabh Hirani

Rescuing a SPAghetti React project

Rescuing a SPAghetti React project

Practical tips for rescuing a SPAghetti React JS project. With confidence and a shared mental model, we made the codebase reliable and easier to manage.

Prathamesh Sonpatki

One year at Last9

One year at Last9

Celebrating one year at Last9! From uncertainty to growth, it's been an amazing journey with an inspiring team and exciting challenges.

Prathamesh Sonpatki