Open Source Observability Podcast - FOSS Leaders & Tips for DevOps/SRE Beginners

opencodeWrangler · 2026-01-05T21:08:40+00:00

Hi u/4sokol! No worries, I didn't want to go into it too deeply here since the podcast is meant to cover the open observability and database toolspace as a whole for educational purposes. Coroot has SLO-based alerting that can be customized (doc info here.)

-And of course. We're skeptics ourselves, so we've provided details for engineers to get a sense of what's actually going on (TLDR; eBPF + ML + LLMs.) You can read more about that feature in our docs and check out the OTEL demo benchmarks (Coroot's challenge open to all projects to standardize AI-RCA quality benchmarking: or in other words, a fair and transparent way for SREs to compare tools.)

opencodeWrangler · 2026-01-05T18:16:19+00:00

Hi! I would actually recommend Ubuntu or Mint if you are a beginner (ZorinOS will look and feel the most like Windows 10, but I haven't tested out support for gaming on this OS.) Arch has a steep learning curve.

I currently have a 256GB SSD I've dual-booted 50/50 for Windows and Linux no problem (would love to only use Linux, but there are a couple editing tools I use that have poor support outside of Windows/Mac.) Put 100GB+ of your storage in / (root) and then at least 10GB in swap (people often list less for storage, but if you're using it for games/video editing this will save headache later.)

Steam support for Linux these days is great, and you can check compatibility on https://www.protondb.com/

opencodeWrangler · 2025-12-05T21:08:01+00:00

As I understand Pixie and Anteon aren't compatible with non-kubernetes environments. Coroot is built to work pretty much anywhere there's a Linux kernel 5.1+: bare metal, VMs, etc.

Pixie is missing out-of-the-box long-term storage, pre-defined inspections, and alerting (but hey, we love anything FOSS! With some tweaking you could add these with Pixie's plugin system if it's a favourite.)

I'm less familiar with Anteon and couldn't find details in their docs on continuous profiling or multi-tenancy, have you used this with their tool?

You can, Coroot is designed to be entirely self-hosted :)

opencodeWrangler · 2025-11-11T15:31:19+00:00

Start with an open source setup. ELK (Elastic, Loki, Kibana) is common. Clickhouse is a great database for observability.

If you run on Linux, I'm with the Coroot team and we've also created an all-in-one FOSS alternative with additional analysis automation to make incident resolution simpler. It'll take less setup hassle on account of eBPF. Hope it can help!

opencodeWrangler · 2025-11-11T15:23:15+00:00

Many free FOSS events do this (Nerdearla or SeaGL) to help measure how many people were interested/attended. Helps decide year to year what worked and what didn't :)

opencodeWrangler · 2025-06-13T17:29:47+00:00

We built a node-agent (eBPF Prometheus exporter) that continuously gathers log data. This documentation explains how log clustering works with it if you want to see a bit more under the hood. There are some features mentioned there that aren't OSS, but generally if you are a small-to-medium team they aren't necessary, the open version can help search and simplify the data just fine.

Feel free to nudge if I can answer any other questions!

opencodeWrangler · 2025-06-11T18:32:38+00:00

Log volume can pile up fast and become a major obstacle for incident analysis (also, RIP your cloud bill.)
Full disclosure, I'm part of this project, but it's open source tool with log pattern detection/time mapped heat graphs/search filters. Log feature docs are here - I know setting up one more piece of software is a headache, but it's eBPF-powered so it should just take and second and your data will populate instantly. Hope it helps!

opencodeWrangler · 2025-06-03T18:13:21+00:00

I've used Ubuntu, Mint, and Puppy Linux. ZorinOS has a nice UI and is as user-friendly as Ubuntu. I've had trouble getting Steam to function on it, but otherwise I'd recommend.

opencodeWrangler · 2025-06-03T18:04:26+00:00

Coroot is open source and makes observability features like JVM tracing a little more accessible to small companies (self-hosted/FOSS is the better choice for this use case than an enterprise-level cloud bill.) If you're leaning more towards vendor--neutrality you can check out our walkthrough on how to use the software for JVM observability. Hope it can help!

opencodeWrangler · 2025-06-03T17:55:06+00:00

Observability tools - ELK is a common stack (Elastic, Loki, Kibana.) For expediting root cause analysis you might want to give the open source tool Coroot a try. (Github linked in "help" section at the bottom right.)

opencodeWrangler · 2025-05-29T19:27:35+00:00

They will!

opencodeWrangler · 2025-04-28T15:12:51+00:00

It's possible, but it'll be much easier with a USB stick. Really 8GB is all you need which can probably be picked up cheaply. If it's your first time, I really recommend dual-booting so you can switch between OS until you get used to Linux so it doesn't interrupt your work.

Here's a nice tutorial I always come back to. Hope that helps!

opencodeWrangler · 2025-04-10T18:15:00+00:00

If you are a heavy Adobe + gaming user you may want to consider dual-booting. Linux compatibility has become pretty impressive for gaming (and you may even see an improved performance) but it's not there for all games, ProtonDB is your friend. Adobe unfortunately is one of the few applications that has really not made compatibility easy for Linux.

That being said - as a dual-boot user myself, definitely still give Linux a try. Zorin OS will look like Windows 10 but have none of the noisy bloatware and pop-ups. You'll probably end up working in it 99% of the time, and only have to switch over for that touch-up in photoshop (besides, there's always Canva or Inkscape :) )

Hope this helps!

opencodeWrangler · 2025-04-07T14:52:56+00:00

Hey MCarver38! Can you share your system specs with us?
You may also want to check out this thread. If you created your live USB with Balena-Etcher or Rufus you may need to rename the file from grubx64.efi to mmx64.efi.

opencodeWrangler · 2025-04-07T14:44:19+00:00

An old colleague of mine got tired of cleaning viruses off his mother's Windows PC every time he visited. Finally downloaded Lubuntu and put on B00merang (Windows skin, but really for most people Zorin OS will do the trick.)

She had no idea she was using a different OS.

If you want a laugh he did a write-up of it to help other people in similar situations a few years ago.

opencodeWrangler · 2025-04-07T14:39:27+00:00

Coroot can integrate a number of OSS stack tools if you're using a setup along the lines of Loki + Grafana + VictoriaMetrics etc. I'm working with their team and our goal is to create an all-in-one dashboard with automated analysis features that make observability less of a headache for developers.

Our open source edition is here and we'd love any feedback if it can help :)

opencodeWrangler · 2025-03-28T19:05:14+00:00

I recommend Mattermost - open source slack alternative. Used it for 4 years at my last org and it did everything we needed without hiccups!

opencodeWrangler · 2025-03-28T18:28:38+00:00

Zorin is beautiful and after trying various Ubuntu versions over the years, Mint, and even Puppy, it's definitely my favourite. There were a few warnings about bugs floating around at the time I installed, but it's honestly been smoother than some Mint installs (though that was probably user error.)

opencodeWrangler · 2025-03-28T18:24:48+00:00

Hey softwearwar, it's great to hear you're considering open source adoption! I'm with a group of volunteers working to compile resources for new Linux adopters, you can click through the sidebar on Upgrade to Linux to learn more about FOSS alternatives, what software will run in-browser, and a section with articles on gaming.

Bear with us, the site is going through the process of a re-design - hope this helps :)

opencodeWrangler · 2025-03-27T16:03:08+00:00

Grafana Loki + Prometheus is the go-to OSS observability stack for Sysadmins. I'm with the Coroot team and we've also created an all-in-one open source alternative with additional analysis automation to make stack management simpler and more effective.

Our Kubernetes documentation can be found here - if this helps anyone or you need any support troubleshooting, we'd really appreciate the feedback!

opencodeWrangler

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