Automating context-aware observability with Blackfire and Upsun
Provide critical context to your monitoring dashboard by automatically notifying Blackfire of specific infrastructure events. You can take the guesswork out of debugging to let you focus on improving your application and infrastructure with clarity.
By Thomas di Luccio, on Nov 06, 2024 Observability is about bringing clarity into darkness. By implementing an observability strategy, developers empower themselves with the superpower of witnessing their applications and/or infrastructure’s actual behavior. They can look through black boxes with bionic glasses.
Blackfire not only eases the collection of observability data but, more importantly, turns it into actionable and critical information. You shouldn’t have to spend time maintaining your observability pipelines but identify in no time improvement opportunities or the reason behind slow-downs.
The information is even more helpful when put into their context. Background information can drastically change your interpretation of a specific event. A sudden surge in traffic right after an advertisement campaign has been rolled out radically differs from spikes after a deployment in production.
When the first invites you to scale up the infrastructure temporarily, the other might indicate that undetected performance regressions have been introduced into the codebase, and further investigations are required.
Blackfire provides a straightforward mechanism for pushing events into the monitoring timeline. A simple cURL command suffices to provide this useful context. Automating critical information pushes, such as deployment ID, infrastructure sizing, etc., is a good practice.
This is precisely what Florent Huck, Developer Relations Engineer at Platform.sh, presents in his blog post “Up(sun) and running with infrastructure processes on Blackfire”.
Upsun is the next-gen Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) designed with a unified infrastructure and application observability solution at its core. Upsun and Blackfire share Platform.sh as their parent company.
In his blog post, Florent took advantage of Upsun’s built-in infrastructure events mechanism to automatically inform Blackfire Monitoring of specific and critical events. He built an elegant and reliable solution that helps future-proofing the application he deploys.
Whether you are familiar with Upsun or not, this article is worth reading, as it might inspire you to design a similar setup with your own infrastructure. Head to the Upsun blog for a detailed journey on how this integration is designed and operates, and let’s continue the conversion on Discord :
https://upsun.com/blog/blackfire-infrastructure-processes
To better observability and beyond
