Arch Linux

ectospasm

Member

Registered: 2015-08-28

Posts: 292

Wiki article idea: Observability

I've had a couple of ideas of articles for the Wiki, but wanted to discuss them first before I make page stubs and start documenting.  This is the first one.

Observability

This article could start by quoting and linking to the Wikipedia article on the same topic.  I also have an idea of adding a brief blurb to the General Recommendations page, or even to the list of applications (with a link to the main Observability article prominently at the top of the section).

As a budding cloud engineer, I've become more interested in observability in web applicationd/services, and in my own hobby projects.  I've done some research into it, and I'm slightly familiar with a few different options.  Most of what I found are open source, and I'd like to link to some options from within this Observability page, with possibly full-blown wiki articles describing various options.  There are more turnkey, commercial offerings as well, and we could list some of those with links for more information.  I actually went with one of those to start off with, mainly so I could learn which features were important to me, before I cobble together some of the more manual options.

When I was searching for ways to monitor my personal web projects, I stumbled upon an ad for New Relic, one of the many commercial offerings.  What struck me as interesting, was that most of New Relic's tools are open source (under an Apache 2.0 license, written in Go).  They offer 100GB of data upload per month for free, which has been plenty for observing my hobby projects on my VPS.  I've already drafted (but not published) PKGBUILDs for some of the tools I've used, mostly from their pre-compiled debs.  There are PKGBUILDs in the AUR (like newrelic-cli and newrelic-infra), but I didn't see a Wiki article describing how to use them.  Unfortunately Arch Linux isn't currently supported by New Relic, and their method of bootstrapping New Relic using only the newrelic command (part of newrelic-cli) didn't work for me so I've had to follow their dispersed manual instructions.  I've run across a few issues so I've gotten onto their forums to seek help.  They have community members who provide the first line of support, and for at least one of my issues they've actually created a New Relic support case for it. 

I even learned about Pressure Stall Information, and wrote my own scripts to monitor and alert when CPU, I/O, or memory pressure gets too high.  It's in a public Git repository, but I wanted shore up some of the documentation before I share a link to it anywhere.

Would an Arch Wiki article like this be worthwhile?  I think it would be, but I didn't want to simply start writing it without having a discussion first.

lahwaacz

Wiki Admin

From: Czech Republic

Registered: 2012-05-29

Posts: 762

Re: Wiki article idea: Observability

This discussion belongs to the wiki, e.g. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/ArchWiki_talk:Requests

ectospasm

Member

Registered: 2015-08-28

Posts: 292

Re: Wiki article idea: Observability

Ahh, OK.  I'll post it there.

avidseeker

Member

Registered: 2022-09-06

Posts: 62

Website

Re: Wiki article idea: Observability

This discussion belongs to the wiki, e.g. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/ArchWiki_talk:Requests

Just curious, why not have Wiki discussions within a Wiki "Help:Community_portal" page? I see many topics here as a possible Wiki discussion rather than a forum discussion.

Wikipedia has it neatly organized: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia … ity_portal