Canary Weekly #1
I thought it’d be nice to capture some of the recent events surrounding the canary.io project. I won’t promise that these sorts of updates will go on indefinitely, but I think it is important to help gather notes on the recent developments to help keep interested parties in the loop.
Since this is the first issue, and I’m the one writing it, I’ll take some liberties and go back a couple weeks ;-)
Core Platform News #
- current work has focused on bringing stability and sanity to the core components. See initial goals in this issue
- improving user experience is the next challenge, but is likely a few weeks out before we have the bandwidth to start tackling that
- most work has gone towards instrumentation. I have chosen to lean on Librato as the target, but anyone is welcome to contribute other targets if they need them
- many thanks to @anachronistic for his contributions and guidance so far
- thanks also to Kyle Kelley for being a continual source of good ideas for where the project can go (see this and this)
- it has become clear that I need to write an official document explaining the goals of the core platform, as no one likes to work in the dark
- Thanks to Brandon Tindle, the main website has been upgraded from a mere gist to something much more pleasing to the eyes ;-)
Open Source Tooling News #
- Jeremy Green launched a nice dashboard tool that is currently hosted here
- Rick Yoesting has built a really cool Hubot plugin
- both developers are interested in participating in a game day in which we will simulate failures and see how their tooling helps us respond (very excited about this!)
- we’re planning to officially host Jeremy’s dashboard this coming week
- Curt Micol and I had an opportunity to sit down and play with Heka, treating the main canary api as a data source. It’s just a spike, but the gist of our work can be found here.
Monitorama Video #
I gave a 5 minute lightening talk at Monitorama on the project. I’m not a strong public speaker, but I was very happy to see a positive community response as well as to meet so many other people interested in alleviating pain in this space.
Monitorama PDX 2014 - Lightning Talk - Michael Gorsuch from Monitorama on Vimeo.
For those that have not attended a Monitorama event, I highly recommend it.