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**Alex Koutmos:** I do indeed, yeah. And then I'm taking a small hiatus from Twitter tips regarding Elixir; but I will be back into it shortly, don't worry everyone. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah. So Alex has been around the Erlang/Elixir community for some years now; I don't know how many... |
**Alex Koutmos:** I think it's gotta be like six years now. I read Saša Juric's book "Elixir in Action" back in 2015, and I was hooked on the Beam since then. Yeah, I guess since 2015 I've been working on the Beam. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That sounds awesome. So the way I know you, Alex, is from the work that you've been doing on the Changelog app, which happens to be an Elixir/Phoenix/Erlang behind the scenes app. You've been doing some fantastic optimizations, especially with those N+1 queries. Thank goodness for that, because the we... |
**Alex Koutmos:** Oh, yeah. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah. And those things didn't happen in a void, right? So you had this amazing library, which you just happen to have; I don't know how many libraries you have, but I'm sure you have a few... But this is prom\_ex, or Prom E-X, as I like to pronounce it, because of that underscore... PromEx - can you t... |
**Alex Koutmos:** \[04:14\] Sure thing. I guess the elevator pitch for PromEx is that you drop in this one library, you add it to your application supervision tree, and then you do some slight configuration, kind of like in an Ecto repo, where you slightly configure your repo, you slightly configure your PromEx module,... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I really like that part, especially the Grafana dashboards. Sometimes it's just so difficult to integrate it just right, get the correct labels, get the correct things... What happens when there's an update? Then you'd have to update the Grafana dashboard. And the one really interesting thing that Pro... |
**Alex Koutmos:** Exactly. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I felt those annotations were so sweet, because it basically owns the entire chain. It will annotate your Grafana dashboards when there are deploys. I felt that was amazing. Like, never mind managing them, which is super-cool, you also got annotations as to who deployed, and which commit was deployed.... |
**Alex Koutmos:** Oh, yeah. These have been pain points for me personally probably since like 2017, because I've been using Prometheus and Grafana for some time now... And I feel like every project I was doing the same boilerplate every single time, with the annotations and stuff like that. But even after I set up that... |
I've been playing around with these ideas for probably a couple years now. PromEx is kind of that materialization of all those ideas. It's slightly opinionated; I feel like a good tool should have some opinions... If those opinions align with the library consumers, that's great. Else, maybe look elsewhere and see if so... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's right. I remember your early days - I would say maybe the beginning of PromEx, when we were trying to figure out what dashboards are missing, and can we improve them slightly... So I remember us working together, a little bit - it wasn't a massive amounts; just enough to make them nice. The int... |
\[07:49\] And you heard that right, we do use Grafana Cloud. We used to run our own Grafana, but then it was much easier to set up Grafana Agent, scrape all the metrics, scrape all the logs from our apps, from all the pods, from everything; we have even the Node Exporter integration in the Grafana Cloud Agent. We ship ... |
So just to backtrack a little bit, all this was possible -- I think the beginning was the application. So Changelog.com, it's publicly available, freely available source code; it's a Phoenix application. That was an excellent idea, Jerod. I don't wanna say it's one of the best ones you've had, but it was a genius idea ... |
So the app, Changelog, is running Phoenix 1.5 right now, Elixir 1.11, but 1.12 came out, so I'm really excited to try that out... And Erlang 23. But as we all know, Erlang 24 got shipped not long ago, and that is an amazing release. What gets you excited about Erlang 24, Alex? |
**Alex Koutmos:** I think the biggest thing is probably the most obvious one, which is the just-in-time compiler that landed in OTP 24. That has some big promises in store for everyone running Elixir and Phoenix applications. I think a few months ago I was actually playing around with the OTP 24 release and I had a dum... |
So I'm really curious to see people taking measurements in production with actual live traffic, and see what the performance characteristics look like for applications with the changeover. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah. I mean, Changelog can definitely benefit from that. It would be great to measure by how much; I think that's one of the plans, to try -- now that OTP 24 is properly out, we had the first patch release land, and we also had just today, a few hours ago, thanks to Twitter and thanks to Alex, ARM su... |
So for those that have tried it or would like to try it, and are wondering why, the performance increases between 30% and 50%. So it can be up to 50% faster whatever you're running, just simply by upgrading to 24. And yeah, depending on how it was compiled, how your code was compiled, it could be even higher. So it dep... |
Okay, so how would someone using PromEx - how would someone figure out what is faster? So you have your app, your Phoenix app or your Elixir app... I'm imagining that PromEx works with Elixir as well; I don't have to have Phoenix. Is that right? |
**Alex Koutmos:** Yeah. And the idea was to decouple the two. Because you might wanna grab Prometheus metrics on your application, but maybe it's like a key worker. There's not gonna be a Phoenix component there. But as we all know, Prometheus needs to scrape something over HTTP, unless you're using remote write. We'll... |
So PromEx actually does ship with a very lightweight HTTP server, and it'll just serve your metrics for you. So you could very easily run PromEx inside of like a key worker, expose that one endpoint and have your Prometheus instance come and scrape it at its regular interval. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah, that's right. And you expose metrics. Just metrics. |
**Alex Koutmos:** \[12:10\] Yeah, for now it's metrics. Earlier you mentioned Grafana Agent, and the idea is to eventually ship that as part of PromEx. It will be like an optional download. So as PromEx is starting, if you configure it to push Prometheus metrics, you can have PromEx download the agent, get it up and ru... |
I've actually used Grafana's cloud offering. It's quite nice, and it makes the observability story super nice, especially if you're running in Heroku, or Gigalixir, places where maybe you don't own the infrastructure end-to-end, and it's tough to have a Prometheus instance scraping your stuff over the public internet. ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's really interesting. So this is such an amazing piece of information, which I don't know how I've missed, but I'm glad that you've mentioned this... Because we were thinking a couple of weeks back "How can we run the Changelog app on Render and have all the metrics and all the logs ship to Grafa... |
So this is super-exciting, because you have metrics already. I am feature requesting logs, please, so that we can ship the logs as well using the Grafana Cloud agent, which I know it supports them. And then the only thing remaining would be traces, which by the way, it also supports. |
So we have metrics, logs and events. That is a very special trio. Can you tell us a bit more about that, Alex? What are your thoughts on that special trio? |
**Gerhard Lazu:** We could start with the abstract and then we can work down into the technical nitty-gritty. So those three that you mentioned just happen to be the pillars of observability. All three of those are the pillars of observability. It's theorized that if you have all three of these pillars in your app, you... |
But jokes aside, the idea is that these three different types of observability tools yield different benefits for your application. So with logs, if you're capturing logs in your applications or your services, you can see in very nitty-gritty detail what's happening on every single request, what's happening if there ar... |
The problem is that you can kind of be inundated by too much information, and it's very difficult to extrapolate higher meaning out of all this nitty-gritty detail. Then, if you've ever run like an ELK Stack and had to administer that, you know the pains of trying to index all this data. |
Then you might say "Okay, let's only log what's important", and I'm sure people with production apps have had their DevOps people come to them and say "Hey, let's dial back the logging. It's a little too much, and Elasticsearch is just keeling over." |
Then you reach for other tools, like metrics. Metrics eventually find their way into some sort of a time series database, and they're usually pretty efficient in comparison to logs, because they're more bounded. You have a measurement, you have a timestamp, and you have some labels associated with it. A little asterisk... |
\[15:57\] So given that you've paired down what information you're capturing, you could start a lot more efficiently, and it's a lot easier to query, and you can keep these for way longer periods of time. But the problem is there that you've now traded off high-fidelity logs for explicit metrics that you're capturing o... |
And then traces is kind of like a merger of the two, logs and metrics, where you can see how long your application is sitting in different parts of the application; if you're making external service calls, how long are you waiting for those external service calls... If you have something like Istio setup and you can tr... |
Again, all three of these are different tools, they have some overlap, but it's really a matter of picking the best tool for the job. It'd be nice if you have all three of those in your company or application, but in the real world it is tough to get all three of these stood up and running efficiently, and running effe... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I really like the way you think about this, I have to say... There is something pragmatic about, and something like - you can have this within five minutes... But I also am very wary, because I've been following Charity Majors' Honeycomb and those perspectives for many years, and my understanding is t... |
So I think that perspective is very interesting, and I will definitely follow up on that some more in the context of this show, of Ship It. But I'm also aware of where we are today - and when I say "we", I mean the Changelog app - what we have already set up, and that ideal, which is that everything is an event. I thin... |
I think it's very interesting to get to that tool which unifies them all, and Grafana Cloud could be it, but there are others as well. Now, I'm not going to go through all the names, because that's boring, but what is interesting is that we seem to be going in the same direction. And we may argue between ourselves whet... |
\[19:59\] And I do know that PromEx helped us or helped you with the N+1 queries. It was very obvious "Hey, we have a problem in Ecto, and this is what that problem looks like, and this is how we fix it. And yes, we fixed it. Does Erlang 24 improve things to Erlang 23, and in what way?" And we can answer those question... |
So I think that monitoring is not going anywhere, and I think everybody respects it for what it is... But we also are aware that there are better ways, and we should improve this. So with that in mind, where do you see PromEx going? What are the hopes and the goals for the project? |
**Alex Koutmos:** Yeah, sure thing. So I'm gonna first address a couple points that you've made, and then I'll answer the question. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Sure. |
**Alex Koutmos:** And this is just my own personal opinion. I don't see everything rolling up into one solution. I just don't think it's feasible at the moment. Like, would it be nice if everything was an event, and we could easily search it, and everything is hunky-dory? I think everyone would agree that yes, that wou... |
I think for now, for the foreseeable future, having those explicit tools for explicit purposes I think makes sense, just because they're very different problems that are trying to be solved, and trying to have one unifying tool that does all the things I don't think will pan out well. |
But I do like the approach that Grafana is taking, and the observability community in general, where they're trying to provide bridges from one pillar to another. A perfect example is exemplars in Prometheus, where your Prometheus metrics can have an exemplar tag on them, and it'll effectively say "Hey, this metric dat... |
So I like that approach better, where you can bounce between the different pillars of observability, but still have the context of "I'm trying to solve this problem. What is going on at this moment in time?" I like that approach. Again, that's just my personal opinion. |
And to that end - and I'll go back to your original question now - I would like to get PromEx to a point where it does take into account things like traces, and you could use exemplars... And if Grafana Agent's incorporated into PromEx, you could very easily use Syslog and export logs from your application via Syslog t... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I think that's a very interesting perspective. I love that. |
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