Hey everyone! I've been part of this community for a while, and I'm excited to share that it helped me land an internship in monitoring and observability. As a college student, I've been working with the monitoring team and learning a ton, but I feel a bit stuck right now and could really use some advice. Here's a bit about what I've accomplished during the internship so far: I've set up Grafana dashboards to track memory, CPU, and some custom Prometheus metrics, created alert rules in Prometheus, and used the Blackbox Exporter to monitor various HTTP endpoints. I've even dived into automating processes using YAML playbooks and have started exploring Docker for container management. I've heard that observability can often be associated with more senior roles since it involves many systems, and I'm wondering where I should go from here. Can I leverage my experiences to apply for junior roles? Also, are tools like Blackbox and whitebox exporters widely used, or are they specific to certain teams? Any advice, next steps, or personal experiences would be super helpful. Thanks!
1 Answer
You're doing great! The skills you've picked up so far are definitely relevant, and good monitoring is important at all levels. As for your question, yes, Blackbox and whitebox exporters are commonly used across numerous teams, especially in SRE and DevOps roles. They form part of the essential toolset with Prometheus. My advice for next steps would be to look into adding Loki and Tempo to your toolkit, learn about alert routing with the Alert Manager, and familiarize yourself with tracing and log correlation. If possible, put your experiences into a GitHub project or blog post to showcase your learning. It'll make your resume shine! You're definitely ready to apply for junior roles in DevOps or SRE positions.
That sounds like an awesome path! I actually started a project that integrates metrics, logs, and traces, too. I'm working with OpenTelemetry and tying everything to Prometheus, Loki, and Tempo. It's exciting to see it all come together, and I’m thinking about blogging about my project as well!