Introduction to Trickster, an open source dashboard accelerator for Prometheus
6:00PM - 6:45PM - Meet, Greet, and Eat! (Food & Beer Provided)
6:50PM - 7:00PM - Welcome, Announcements
7:00PM - 7:40PM - James Ranson - Trickster - An Open Source Dashboard Accelerator for Prometheus
7:40PM - 8:00PM - Questions, Open Discussion
Trickster, an open source project written in Go, is a reverse proxy cache for the Prometheus HTTP APIv1 that dramatically accelerates dashboard rendering times for any series queried from Prometheus. Most dashboards request the entire time range of data from the time series database, every time a dashboard loads or reloads. Trickster's Delta Proxy inspects the time range of a client query to determine what data points are already cached, and requests only the data points still needed to service the client request from Prometheus. This results in dramatically faster chart load times for everyone, since Prometheus is queried only for tiny incremental changes on each dashboard load, rather than several hundred data points of duplicative data. In this presentation James Ranson will discuss how Trickster was developed at Comcast, and go through a deeper technical dive on the features, and how it's used.
James Ranson is a Platform Software Architect currently living in Denver Colorado. He has been with Comcast for over 8 years specializing in creating software and platforms that operate efficiently and scale horizontally. He is an expert on software development and release management, especially at the crossing point of agile methodologies and architecture. Through the years James has designed several real-time dashboards that are used for Comcast's Video Operations, and recently developed an open source project, Trickster. Trickster is a dashboard accelerator for Prometheus, which is an open source system monitoring and alerting toolkit. James has a passion for nature and likes to spend his time exploring the mountains in Colorado. He also enjoys skiing and is a fan of the Denver Broncos.