Imagine you want to display the JVM metric system_cpu_usage in your Grafana dashboard. You go ahead, create a panel with the query max(system_cpu_usage) since you wish to see the maximum CPU usage of all your instances. And because you want a smooth graph, you make it more readable by limiting data points.

The function Math.abs(int) defined as

Returns the absolute value of an int value. If the argument is not negative, the argument is returned. If the argument is negative, the negation of the argument is returned.

Do you have some graphs in your Grafana dashboard which become hard on the eye when you look at longer time windows (e.g. 2 days, 1 week, …)? Today I learned (TIL) — actually it was yesterday, but who cares? — how to resolve that issue.

The other day at work, I was tasked with checking whether our Kafka setup is GDPR-compliant or not. It turned out, that our setup is not compliant. Luckily, the service was not yet live, and the Kafka topics didn’t contain any PII.