Official Prometheus video playlist

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apoorve kalot

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Feb 29, 2020, 4:25:04 PM2/29/20
to Prometheus Developers
Hello all,

I have some ideas which i want to work upon, under Prometheus, i don't know if it would be of that level, but i need of opinion of your all.

The idea is, developing a series of official YouTube tutorials which will be part of official Documentation for working and playing with Prometheus, like from basics of node exporter to writing custom exporter in custom language, or working with 3rd party exporters,

Why it is necessary/ should be done : In the community IRC, there are times when people might ask a information, which might be redundant, or might be useful to other user at later point of time, and these tutorials, or videos about basic misconceptions, would help to clear all these related problems

Example : Some of the other open source communities have these playlist as part of official documentation, which helps community as well, along with people who want use/contribute to the product itself, like Kubernetes, TensorFlow, etc.

Advantages of using it :
* The Redundant discussion of basic usage of Prometheus and other related tools.
* Would indirectly help in extending support to community itself, and thus would also help in getting new members/contributors which might turn into individual maintainers as well.
*  Learning through videos is more efficient as compared to documentation, or written stuff [ for this opinion not all might be in favor, but everyone would agree about the fact that former is faster than latter one ]. For serious bugs and problems, one can always refer and ask help back from Prometheus community IRC.
 
These videos, other than basic implementation, would also contain basic practices which involves while using Prometheus and it's services.

Note : i haven't have selected the specifics topics which should be included in these videos, but i would be asking other Developers/Maintainers of the Prometheus as well as regular users of Prometheus. [ I asked some of the maintainers on IRC and they liked the idea, so i posted it here with some courage : ) ]

Hoping to get your response/criticism about this, Thank you.

Julien Pivotto

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Feb 29, 2020, 4:37:35 PM2/29/20
to apoorve kalot, Prometheus Developers
On 29 Feb 13:25, apoorve kalot wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I have some ideas which i want to work upon, under Prometheus, i don't know
> if it would be of that level, but i need of opinion of your all.


Hello, Thanks for your ideas.


> The idea is, *developing a series of official YouTube tutorials which will
> be part of official Documentation* for working and playing with Prometheus,
> like from basics of node exporter to writing custom exporter in custom
> language, or working with 3rd party exporters,
>
> *Why it is necessary/ should be done* : In the community IRC, there are
> times when people might ask a information, which might be redundant, or
> might be useful to other user at later point of time, and these tutorials,
> or videos about basic misconceptions, would help to clear all these related
> problems

I don't see why that can't be handled by current documentation.
Videos have downsides, like they take time to read, are hard to update,
and are not easy to use for everyone. Think about people with
disabilities.

> *Example* : Some of the other open source communities have these playlist
> as part of official documentation, which helps community as well, along
> with people who want use/contribute to the product itself, like Kubernetes,
> TensorFlow, etc.
>
> *Advantages of using it* :
> * The Redundant discussion of basic usage of Prometheus and other related
> tools.

In any way that would be redundant with our written documentation

> * Would indirectly help in extending support to community itself, and thus
> would also help in getting new members/contributors which might turn into
> individual maintainers as well.
> * Learning through videos is more efficient as compared to documentation,
> or written stuff [ for this opinion not all might be in favor, but everyone
> would agree about the fact that former is faster than latter one ]. For
> serious bugs and problems, one can always refer and ask help back from
> Prometheus community IRC.

Some videos exists on some concepts, thinking about:
1/ promcon talks
https://promcon.io/2016-berlin/talks/prometheus-design-and-philosophy/
https://promcon.io/2016-berlin/talks/life-of-a-label/
https://promcon.io/2017-munich/talks/staleness-in-prometheus-2-0/
https://promcon.io/2017-munich/talks/storing-16-bytes-at-scale/

2/ Robust Perception trainings
https://training.robustperception.io/

3/ lots of youtube videos
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=prometheus+monitoring

> These videos, other than basic implementation, would also contain basic
> practices which involves while using Prometheus and it's services.
>
> Note : i haven't have selected the specifics topics which should be
> included in these videos, but i would be asking other
> Developers/Maintainers of the Prometheus as well as regular users of
> Prometheus. [ I asked some of the maintainers on IRC and they liked the
> idea, so i posted it here with some courage : ) ]
>
> Hoping to get your response/criticism about this, Thank you.

I do think personally that videos are not a nice way to provide
documentation. They could cover very high level overviews but for the
real stuff, amendable, copy-pastable, and available to people with
disabilities written docs sound be a lot better.

Maybe we can add a list of good videos in the docs; but that should not
substitute them. From what I see on youtube a lot of topics are covered
already by the community.

--
(o- Julien Pivotto
//\ Open-Source Consultant
V_/_ Inuits - https://www.inuits.eu
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Julius Volz

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Mar 1, 2020, 3:45:30 AM3/1/20
to apoorve kalot, Prometheus Developers
I always wanted to create some YouTube videos covering certain topics, but never did it yet because I have certain quality expectations, and it costs a lot of (free and unpaid) time and energy to create good videos. Videos have some upsides like being able to visualize and quickly demonstrate things via screencasts, animations, etc., or just by more casual explanation than in a documentation.

But they also have a bunch of downsides, like:

- It's almost impossible to keep them up to date unless you have a professional video recording team re-recording things whenever something changes.
- It's harder with videos to just skim a topic quickly and find just the information you care about (for that, written documentation is usually easier).
- They generally just take a large effort to do properly, and the joy and use you get from them as a learner really depends a lot on the quality of the instructor and the video production quality.

I'd still love to explain certain topics via video at some point if I find the time and energy, but it would probably never be able to be a replacement for documentation, just explaining certain key concepts or demoing how to set up Prometheus in various ways, etc. So more of a complementary resource.

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Matthias Rampke

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Mar 2, 2020, 10:26:55 AM3/2/20
to Julius Volz, apoorve kalot, Prometheus Developers
Do we have a somewhat up-to-date curated list of Prometheus-related talks / recordings that are already around?

/MR

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Julius Volz

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Mar 2, 2020, 10:31:19 AM3/2/20
to Matthias Rampke, apoorve kalot, Prometheus Developers
Not that I'm aware of. We have a couple of early talks on https://prometheus.io/docs/introduction/media/, but it's pretty dated.

Krasimir Georgiev

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Mar 2, 2020, 10:54:57 AM3/2/20
to Julius Volz, Matthias Rampke, apoorve kalot, Prometheus Developers
I saw that Thanos uses https://www.katacoda.com/ and maybe that would be a better options than videos which might be outdated quite fast.

Julius Volz

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Mar 2, 2020, 11:00:12 AM3/2/20
to Krasimir Georgiev, Matthias Rampke, apoorve kalot, Prometheus Developers
Yeah! Katacoda would be great if someone wants to create detailed walkthroughs etc. for it. Since it's all git-based it would also be much easier to keep up to date than videos.

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apoorve kalot

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Mar 2, 2020, 11:04:04 AM3/2/20
to Prometheus Developers
Hello all,

Thanks for your views, i wanted to state that as i initially thought to keep these videos as just complementary part as stated, apart from official documentation ( as mentioned by Julius himself as well ).  I also agree to both Julien and Julius about the points stated that keeping videos updated and upto certain quality measure which could be tough, but for that we can set some basic benchmarks while making videos, like what type of content should be used, ( whether it is animation, screen recording, casual explanation, hands-on or combinations of these ), periodicity at which these videos might get updated, ( or might involve some new changes which get into production after new version release ).

Julien, I know there are playlist and many vidoes for these purposes as well but they have downside of their own :
* Some of these talks and videos which are stated are being old enough as in current times new versions of Prometheus services might got update/upgrade in some/new feature.
* Some of these playlist ( or courses ) are paid, and which might not be good option for new comers. ( also it doesn't correlate with "open source" that generally being practiced by Prometheus community ).
* People would generally follow tutorials from standard and official product maintainers as compared to third party or individual content ( if they are of good quality ). And these unofficial guides might not be of that helpful as well as they may get outdated too.

So what we could do, as Krasi mentioned that we could have some learning environment where we could deploy resources for learning concepts and these environments would be better option, serving as complementary to official documentation.
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Julius Volz

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Mar 2, 2020, 11:36:22 AM3/2/20
to apoorve kalot, Prometheus Developers
On Mon, Mar 2, 2020 at 5:04 PM apoorve kalot <apoo1...@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello all,

Thanks for your views, i wanted to state that as i initially thought to keep these videos as just complementary part as stated, apart from official documentation ( as mentioned by Julius himself as well ).  I also agree to both Julien and Julius about the points stated that keeping videos updated and upto certain quality measure which could be tough, but for that we can set some basic benchmarks while making videos, like what type of content should be used, ( whether it is animation, screen recording, casual explanation, hands-on or combinations of these ), periodicity at which these videos might get updated, ( or might involve some new changes which get into production after new version release ).

Julien, I know there are playlist and many vidoes for these purposes as well but they have downside of their own :
* Some of these talks and videos which are stated are being old enough as in current times new versions of Prometheus services might got update/upgrade in some/new feature.
* Some of these playlist ( or courses ) are paid, and which might not be good option for new comers. ( also it doesn't correlate with "open source" that generally being practiced by Prometheus community ).
* People would generally follow tutorials from standard and official product maintainers as compared to third party or individual content ( if they are of good quality ). And these unofficial guides might not be of that helpful as well as they may get outdated too.

So what we could do, as Krasi mentioned that we could have some learning environment where we could deploy resources for learning concepts and these environments would be better option, serving as complementary to official documentation.

Totally. It's just a matter of someone actually doing and maintaining it over a time. It happens more easily if someone is willing to spend money on it, of course :)
 
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apoorve kalot

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Mar 3, 2020, 8:03:39 AM3/3/20
to Prometheus Developers
On basis of above discussion, I propose that, if any of the available maintainers would like to mentor me for creating a katacoda scenario for Prometheus as well, for serving as complementary resources to official Prometheus document.
I could prepare associated design document in about 1-2 week, which will be including what type of content to be added to it, variety and depth of each used content.
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