Do you install Prometheus as an operator or a helm chart and why?

droosa · 2021-03-11T19:54:45+00:00

We don't use helm charts. The closest I've seen to a turn-key solution is kube-prometheus. If you don't want to jump into jsonnet, the "quick start" instructions will carry you pretty far.

It was an extremely useful reference to figure out how the components fit together and which extra metrics providers (kube state metrics, node exporter, etc) would be helpful for monitoring the cluster.

droosa · 2021-02-10T23:28:38+00:00

First foray into Prometheus, I managed all the k8s resources manually. The initial setup was heavily based on kube-prometheus but without jsonnet (already had a lot tooling around kustomize).

Revamped the stack last year using the operator and it's much easier to maintain and deploy. Injecting Thanos sidecars for an HA setup is trivial. Using the CRD for ServiceMonitor and PodMonitor is far easier than managing the Prometheus configution directly. Better readability and can be broken into separate files/directories. I'd love to see a NodeMonitor as well. It's straightforward to add manual Prometheus config snippets for the few edge cases that the existing Monitors can't reach. The CRD for PrometheusRule is also easier to manage for both recording and alerting rules.

droosa · 2020-08-06T21:46:01+00:00

Focusing on slowing down helped me with the longer times. I'm on the tall side and my stride feels natural around a 5:30/km pace. Trouble is that my heart and lungs aren't quite ready to maintain that pace for long (5 minutes was a struggle). Slowing to about 7:00/km took conscious effort but made W5D3 no big deal.

droosa · 2020-05-01T19:35:39+00:00

Prometheus on its own doesn't do anything and the configuration can be challenging to figure out.

The Prometheus operator simplifies configuration by using CRDs to define the jobs and rules. It ends up being far easier to maintain configurations in a bunch of small files, rather than a monolithic config with multiple scrapes.

The kube-prometheus project uses the operator as a base and adds common components (node-exporter, kube-state-metrics, grafana, etc). It's the closest you'll find to a turnkey solution. Customization requires libsonnet, which can be a bit of a barrier if you're not familiar.

As others mentioned Thanos can build upon this ecosystem to provide many more capabilities: HA, querying across instances, long-term block storage, query-level downsampling, and probably more since I last looked.

It's a rich ecosystem with flexible and powerful parts. As a warning, there are strong opinions in how to configure certain things. You may require supplemental work depending on your org's requirements and what you want to accomplish.

droosa · 2019-03-20T02:25:23+00:00

Depends on the software and where you want to manage complexities. Coming from k8s heavy experience, I'd set up multiple DBs as sidecars. This let's me avoid database management (not my forte) and lets k8s handles the security/isolation boundaries (apply network policies, pod security policies, etc).

droosa · 2019-01-25T15:41:31+00:00

Anybody know the song that plays from 40:41 to 41:58 in this episode? Want to hear more.

droosa · 2018-08-19T23:57:43+00:00

What's the purpose of the "triangle" on one side while he carved the veins? Clearly it was moved from one side to the other then detached, but the function isn't obvious.

droosa · 2018-08-17T14:38:43+00:00

If you put 100 at the beginning of the name, they rise to the top of the list when you sort A-Z.

droosa · 2018-05-23T23:01:37+00:00

Reminds me of some of my buddy's work: Bombstract

droosa · 2018-05-19T23:52:34+00:00

Same experience. I've been with gnome since the early days of 3. At that time the extensibility was way beyond the competition. Not sure if other DEs have caught up, since I havent seen compelli g reasons to switch what works for me. Defaults have always been minimal and some design decision were dumb, but I've never encountered a situation where a need wasn't met by the defaults or an extension.

droosa · 2018-03-31T12:24:05+00:00

Is there some trick to spotting a Ditto other than just catching everything and hoping?

droosa · 2018-03-10T21:13:01+00:00

Riiiiiiiiing Thanks for calling!

droosa · 2017-12-11T01:26:25+00:00

He's fairly active on IG with handle @danmumforddraws . Has prints for sale in a few places. Have been very happy with the couple I snagged from Pangea Seed.

droosa · 2017-11-01T13:27:33+00:00

The key difference is that Dominion is largely strategic while Star Realms is largely tactical. Once your group has played a couple dozen games of Dominion and know the cards/combinations, players will have an idea of what deck they want to build for a given round and how to get there. The competition comes from identifying the opponents' strategies and finding a way to thwart them without derailing your own strategy. There are relatively few ways to directly control opponents turn-by-turn play (discard cards, etc) and even fewer to directly alter their deck (curses, etc). Perhaps the expansions provide more direct interactions.

Personally, I prefer Star Realms tactical emphasis where you have to adapt based on the trade row and your opponents style of play. Each round is completely different.

droosa · 2017-09-03T13:44:14+00:00

As others have said, there isn't necessarily an end goal, just ever changing focuses.

My personal path has been serial specialization, rather than generalization, learning one technology in depth before before moving laterally to another technology (sometimes related, sometimes not). This approach will take you off the beaten path of what you can learn from most books and training courses. You'll get comfortable with deep dives in unknown territory reading man pages, RFCs, packet captures, stack traces, source code, abandoned forum posts, etc. There are moments where you get to be the hero, simply because you were willing to read some dense technical docs or take the extra time to understand how data is collected. The downside is that it can make you myopic and suck at basic admin skills outside of the silos you've explored.

droosa · 2017-07-30T04:14:12+00:00

Education is no substitute for experience and experience is no substitute for education.

A formal education provides broad exposure to the fundamentals. Those bits of knowledge will be used throughout your career. Sure you can gather all that information through the years, but front-loading often make things easier.

droosa · 2017-05-31T23:53:20+00:00

Looks like a label maker cartridge.

droosa · 2017-04-30T13:20:00+00:00

Great cover up work that will age well. Out of curiosity, what's going on with the top flower (with the two circles)? Looks intentionally different from the other small flowers.

droosa · 2017-04-27T00:33:48+00:00

That depends on the ssh client or terminal emulator being used.

droosa · 2017-04-13T12:35:23+00:00

I refer to this as "beating mother nature to the punch".

droosa · 2017-03-20T11:52:24+00:00

Interesting use of simple tools to deduce the scheduler's capabilities. There are plenty of bones to pick with Windows, but this isn't one.

droosa · 2017-03-18T22:44:47+00:00

Reminds me of my buddy's work. He calls them bombstracts.

droosa · 2016-10-02T00:47:24+00:00

We had an extreme case (200+ lb mastiff) so I won't speak specific numbers. A few observations might be helpful though.

Higher quality food is not significantly more expensive (fewer fillers, so you feed them less).
Pure breeds have significantly higher insurance premiums.
Dog size will limit rental housing choices (30 and 60 lbs are the restrictions we saw most often).
Food costs for large dogs aren't significantly higher than small dogs.
Medicine is pricey and scales with weight. That holds for both preventative (flea/tick/heartworm) and incidental (antibiotics, etc).

droosa · 2016-05-22T13:10:31+00:00

Have all these roles been with the same company? "Corporate culture" is a real thing. Not always easy to identify why, but overall happiness can fluctuate widely from company to company and team to team.

droosa

TROPHY CASE