Starting in August 2024 (for usage from July 2024 onwards), invoices will also be sent via email, and more

Hello, this is id:kmuto from Mackerel team CRE. I'd like to inform you about recent updates.

Starting in August 2024 (for usage from July 2024 onwards), invoices will also be sent via email

Invoices for Mackerel usage paid by credit card can currently be downloaded from via a link in the payment confirmation email or on the Mackerel Web Console. However, due to a change in the specifications of our external payment service, the download period has been limited to 30 days, which has long caused inconvenience to our users.

Starting in August 2024, in addition to the payment confirmation email previously sent by Mackerel, invoices for Mackerel usage paid by credit card (for usage from July 2024 and payments processed on or after August 1st, 2024) will be sent via email from the external payment service, Stripe. These invoices will be compliant with the Qualified Invoice System (Simple Invoice), similar to the invoices you could download before.

Invoice emails will be sent from the email address receipts+acct_1DCHTLK8x8YyOOGH@stripe.com only to the owner of the organization. The payment confirmation email, as before, will be sent to the billing email addresses added in the organization settings, but this invoice email will not be sent to those addresses.

The increase() function is now available in PromQL query language for Query Graphs

Mackerel has a ability toaccept OpenTelemetry-formatted metrics, which can be displayed or monitored as Query Graphs using the PromQL query language in custom dashboards and monitoring rules.

We have added the increase() function to the list of PromQL functions supported by Mackerel. The increase() function returns the increase in the value of a counter (monotonically increasing metric) over a specified time range for each time series in a range vector.

The following PromQL query represents the metric app.frontend.requests with the label status set to 500.

app.frontend.requests{status="500"}

Since the above query shows a monotonic increase and makes it difficult to understand the increments, we will use the increase() function to calculate the increase over a 5-minute (5m) range.

increase(app.frontend.requests{status="500"}[5m])

For information on the PromQL features currently supported by Mackerel, please refer to the following documentation.

mackerel.io

The --jq option is now available for the org subcommand in mkr

Mackerel's CLI tool, mkr, allows you to retrieve various information about Mackerel in JSON format. Furthermore, mkr has a built-in mechanism to process this result with jq syntax, the de facto standard for JSON filtering, which you can utilize using the --jq option.

mkr org, used to retrieve organization names and display names, was the only retrieval command that did not support the --jq option. This has been fixed in mkr v0.58.0 (included in mackerel-agent v0.82.0 for Windows), and the --jq option is now available for use with mkr org.

$ mkr org
{
    "name": "mackerel-bizdemo",
    "displayName": "Mackerel🐟Demo environment"
}
$ mkr org --jq '.name'
mackerel-bizdemo
$ mkr org --jq '.displayName'
Mackerel🐟Demo environment

By utilizing jq syntax, you can process Mackerel information in various ways without having to create a separate program. We encourage you to take advantage of the --jq option in mkr!

We fixed an issue in mackerel-plugin-mailq and check-mailq where a queue length of 1 was not detected

There are two plugins for monitoring mail queue congestion on mail servers: mackerel-plugin-mailq, which represents the queue length as a metric, and check-mailq, which checks for the existence of mail in the queue. Previously, there was a bug where a queue length of 1 was counted as 0 (in the case of check-mailq, no alert was triggered). This has been fixed so that a queue length of 1 is now correctly counted.

This fix is included in mackerel-plugin-mailq v0.83.0 and check-mailq v0.47.0.

We would like to thank yongjiajun for the contribution to this fix!

The check-redis reachable subcommand now returns CRITICAL instead of UNKNOWN on failure

The Redis check monitoring plugin, check-redis, has a reachable subcommand that checks whether the Redis server is reachable. Previously, it returned OK on success and UNKNOWN on failure. In Mackerel, UNKNOWN means that monitoring is not possible, which is not appropriate for a reachability check result.

In mackerel-check-plugins v0.47.0, the behavior of the check-redis reachable subcommand has been changed to return CRITICAL on failure, similar to other check monitoring. Please be aware of this change if your operations were based on the previous behavior (OK/UNKNOWN response).