December 2022 Summaries

This installment of our “Community Member Spotlight” series highlights the success story of Newtrax, a leader in IoT and underground mining operations, who has optimized their clients' profitability and saved lives by leveraging TimescaleDB, an open-source relational database for time-series and analytics. As the lead data engineer at Newtrax, Jean-François Lambert shares his experience with TimescaleDB, which has enabled the company to reduce tech debt, improve performance, and gain insights from large datasets. With its hypertables feature, TimescaleDB has allowed Newtrax to handle massive amounts of data, providing contextualized and accurate results for predictive maintenance and collision avoidance. The company's deployment of TimescaleDB has been successful, with improvements ranging from modest to outstanding, and has enabled them to streamline their data pipeline, reduce costs, and increase productivity. Newtrax's experience with TimescaleDB serves as an inspiration to others in the industry, demonstrating the power of open-source technology in solving complex problems and driving innovation.

Jaeger's Service Performance Monitoring (SPM) feature is a welcome addition to the Jaeger UI, providing easy access to aggregated RED metrics from traces. It offers a high-level overview of service-level operations and allows for direct analysis in Jaeger's Tracing tab. SPM changes distributed tracing by aggregating metrics from collected traces, reducing skewing issues due to sampling rates. This feature is particularly useful when combined with OpenTelemetry Collector and Promscale, offering a unified storage backend for metrics and traces. By using PostgreSQL with Promscale, users can benefit from full Jaeger support, first-class Prometheus support, flexible storage options, and a rock-solid foundation built on mature technologies.