June 2019 Summaries

State Street to CHAOSSEARCH Co-Op – Why I Made the Switch` The author made a drastic career change from working at State Street Bank, a large corporate entity, to joining CHAOSSEARCH Co-Op, an early-stage start-up. The decision was not taken lightly and required leaving their current co-op, dealing with potential repercussions from their university, and navigating a challenging work environment. Despite initial concerns about the lack of structure and technology at CHAOSSEARCH, the author has found it to be a fulfilling and growth-oriented experience. They have appreciated the company's emphasis on collaboration, camaraderie, and celebrating colleagues' successes, which has helped them build confidence in their abilities and develop new skills. The author has come to realize that what truly matters is not the perks or benefits offered by an employer, but rather the opportunity to work with like-minded individuals who share a passion for their field.

Cloudflare has introduced its Logpush API, which simplifies the analysis of Cloudflare logs by automatically sending GZIP JSON files directly to Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage. This eliminates the need for users to continually download and upload logs to an object store, but still requires storing data in a hot Elasticsearch cluster. To address this, CHAOSSEARCH integrates with Cloudflare logs, indexes data, and writes it back into an Amazon S3 account, providing a fully integrated Kibana interface without requiring users to move their data to an ELK stack or ETL platform. The integration is straightforward, taking just 4 steps, including inputting the bucket name, copying the bucket policy, adding an ownership token, and selecting data fields. With CHAOSSEARCH, users can go from raw data to insights within minutes, leveraging Amazon S3's cost-effectiveness and scalability.

The Monitorama 2019 conference featured a diverse range of talks on topics such as chaos engineering, software supply chain management, observability tools, and distributed tracing. Notable speakers included John Allspaw, Nora Jones, Luke Demi, and Dave Josephsen, who shared their expertise on various aspects of monitoring and observability. The event also highlighted the importance of human performance in system reliability and the need for context to investigate real-world issues. Additionally, the conference showcased several open-source projects, including Grafeas, Kritis, Loki, and Athena, which aim to improve software supply chain management, distributed tracing, and data querying. Overall, Monitorama 2019 was an excellent event that brought together a community of professionals interested in monitoring and observability.