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Level Up Your MS Teams Monitoring with Custom Syntax Highlighting 🚀
Hey everyone! 👋 Let’s talk about making your daily workflow with MS Teams a little smoother – and a lot more visually appealing. I recently heard a fascinating story from a tech conference about a clever workaround for a common monitoring frustration, and I wanted to share it with you.
The Problem: PromQL in Teams – A Color Nightmare 😫
We’ve all been there. You’re meticulously crafting a PromQL query to monitor your infrastructure, and you want to share it in MS Teams. But… it’s just a wall of plain text. 🤯 It’s hard to read, difficult to understand, and frankly, not the best way to communicate complex data. The speaker highlighted a significant pain point: sharing large PromQL queries without syntax highlighting is a real headache. It can lead to misinterpretations and wasted time. The speaker noted that Microsoft Teams currently doesn’t natively support Go language syntax highlighting, leading to a frustrating experience when dealing with complex queries.
The Solution: Reverse Engineering & HighlightJS 💡
So, what’s the solution? Well, this brilliant individual took matters into their own hands. They reverse engineered MS Teams’ web interface to discover that they were actually using HighlightJS, a popular open-source syntax highlighter. This was a crucial insight! It meant that the potential was already there.
The speaker then went a step further and created a custom grammar for HighlightJS specifically tailored to PromQL. This grammar allows HighlightJS to correctly interpret and color-code PromQL queries, making them much easier to read and understand. Currently, this grammar is hosted in their personal GitHub namespace, but the speaker believes it would be a valuable addition to the broader Prometheus community. It’s a fantastic example of community-driven problem-solving!
The Roadblock: MS Teams Integration 🛠️
Here’s where things get interesting. While the grammar is working perfectly, the speaker is currently facing a challenge: integrating it directly into MS Teams. They’ve opened an issue on Microsoft’s feedback tracker, but haven’t yet received a response. This highlights a common frustration – even with great solutions, getting them adopted can be difficult.
A Call to Action: Help the Community 👾
The speaker is actively seeking connections within Microsoft, particularly within the MS Teams team. If you have any contacts who might be able to help accelerate this integration, please reach out! It would be a huge win for the entire Prometheus monitoring community. Let’s help make sharing complex data in Teams a breeze.
Tools & Technologies Mentioned 💾
- MS Teams: The primary platform for the challenge.
- PromQL: The core query language being highlighted.
- HighlightJS: The open-source syntax highlighter used as the foundation.
- GitHub: Where the custom PromQL grammar is currently hosted.
- Prometheus Community: The suggested location for the grammar.
Looking Ahead 📡
This story underscores the importance of community collaboration and creative problem-solving. It also demonstrates that even seemingly small improvements can have a significant impact on productivity and clarity. Let’s hope this integration comes to fruition, making it easier for all of us to share and understand our monitoring data in MS Teams. Let’s keep an eye on that issue tracker! ✨