Senior SWE TL @Google | ex Principal @RedHat | @ThanosMetrics @PrometheusIO | Bsky: bsky.app/profile/bwplotka.de… | Efficient Go 📖 @OReillyMedia
London, England
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🚨 ALERTS{alertname="NewBlogPost", alertstate="firing"} 1
I wrote about exciting and ambitious changes we are making in @PrometheusIO project:
prometheus.io/blog/2026/02/1…
Diving into the potential future of the "native" model for the composite metric types in Prometheus. 💪
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"Make me care" is probably first rule to follow in tech talks too (:
gwern.net/blog/2026/make-me-…
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Woke up today to my blog post appearing on the top 10 of hacker news today!
Sounds like my site is up on down due to concurrent traffic... 🙃 switched to higher provider tier, but if it's down, here is a backup link: web.archive.org/web/20251111…
Side projects, blog, podcasting is hard with 2 small kids, but I eventually managed to find time for a blog! (PS: I had to switch to 5am routine 🙈)
Wrote some words about @DuffieldJesse #lazygit OSS tool and what we can learn from its UX. Enjoy! 🤗
bwplotka.dev/2025/lazygit/
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100% this.
We are in the cycle of "unifying things", which is like going back to monoliths for DBs, collection, SDKs etc.
Tempting but maybe utopia?
BUT no one blocks ppl from trying and learning on their mistakes (: We will see in 5y cycle to move back to dedicated solutions.
There are DevOps and SRE engineers who think that a unified database for metrics and logs is a good idea. This isn't a good idea from an operations perspective because of the following reasons:
- Lower availability. If something wrong happens with the stored logs, there are high chances that this will affect metrics stored in the same database, and vice versa.
- Noisy neighbour. You cannot allocate dedicated resources (storage space and storage IO, CPU, RAM, network bandwidth) individually for metrics and logs if they are stored in the same database. These resources are shared, so the increase in logs' workload may negatively affect metrics' workload and vice versa.
- Operational complexity and efficiency. You cannot have individual backup and recovery strategies per metrics and logs stored in the same database. Logs and metrics may require different retention policies. These policies are hard to implement efficiently and clearly when logs and metrics are stored in the same database.
- Query usability and performance. Efficient querying metrics and logs are completely different things - they need different query languages optimised for typical queries over metrics and logs. They also need different optimizations at the database level for achieving high querying performance and low resource usage.
So think twice before choosing an all-in-one observability solution for metrics, logs, traces and profiles, which stores all this data into a single database, and advertises this as a feature. It usually works great at demo time and at low load in staging environments, but it may not be so great under load in production because of the issues mentioned above.
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Side projects, blog, podcasting is hard with 2 small kids, but I eventually managed to find time for a blog! (PS: I had to switch to 5am routine 🙈)
Wrote some words about @DuffieldJesse #lazygit OSS tool and what we can learn from its UX. Enjoy! 🤗
bwplotka.dev/2025/lazygit/
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FYI, @CloudNativeFdn KubeCon Europe (23-26th March) CFP closes in 3 days (12th October). What fun talks do you plan to propose? (:
events.linuxfoundation.org/k…
What'd you like to like to hear more about?
Maybe you'd like to co-speak? Happy to mentor/co-speak with passionate ppl!
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PromCon is one month away! 🤗
We wrote all your need to know on our blog: prometheus.io/blog/2025/09/2…
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Fun bugs happen, let's see if you can spot them (without looking on comments)! (:
Quiz#1: Why "make check" will never detect any formatting errors in the following snippet:
gist.github.com/bwplotka/5c6…
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Thinking about starting writing more again (blog posting, social media).. should I?
I have some engineering/oss/mentoring topics queued for too long 🙈
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Apply today on the LFX website 🤗
mentorship.lfx.linuxfoundati…
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Ever dreamed to be mentored by @PrometheusIO community; get skilled in high performance monitoring databases, @golang and help #opensource on the way?
Apply today on the LFX website 🤗
mentorship.lfx.linuxfoundati…
Applications for @PrometheusIO LFX mentorships open today!
We have some highly impactful projects this time, around Prometheus OTel UX, Remote Write 2.0, and Native summaries.
Go apply to work with some really cool folks, and learn while you're at it! 🔥
github.com/cncf/mentoring/bl…
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In other words @valyala, what makes you (likely) discouraging your users to push events (or some other unrealistic use case) to your VictoriaMetrics project, yet you encourage others to abuse git as as a dump snapshot cache and audit database? (((:
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Absolutely, but why we abuse git for this purpose, obfuscating our work and git history.
Use the tools that are designed for those goals.
e.g., we (Google) mirror what's needed internally on our build pipelines and add vendoring there.
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Our KubeCon talk recording is out: piped.video/Rw4c7lmdyFs
What if we can define a schema for important @PrometheusIO metrics, version it, allow users to pin PromQL metric to a certain schema version and solve metric renaming problems? 😍
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Context: github.com/prometheus/promet…
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Epic discussion around @golang error handling: github.com/golang/go/discuss…
Adventurous ideas. Ofc there might something to improve, but the following image is still applicable: 🙈
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Oh nice, this is already released?
We use "dosu" in some parts of the ecosystem github.com/prometheus/client… and it's a mixed bag.
Maybe useful for beginner audience, but often embarrassing. Maybe a one way of solving this (e.g. respond with AI if the question feels also from AI)
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