A Comparison of Mapping Approaches for Distributed Cloud Applications
An application map is a topology view of the components of a distributed application and the network or interprocess interactions between them. A recent article gives an overview of application mapping approaches adopted by various tools like AppDynamics, OpenTracing and Netsil.
Metrics Collection and Monitoring at Robinhood Engineering
The Robinhood server operations team published a series of articles talking about their metrics collection, monitoring and alerting infrastructure. OpenTSDB, Grafana, Kafka and Riemann form the core of the stack, with Kafka acting as a proxy layer from which the data is pushed into Riemann for stream processing of the metrics and into OpenTSDB for storage.
DigitalOcean Adds Monitoring and Alerting Features
Cloud infrastructure provider DigitalOcean recently released capabilities for monitoring servers and sending alerts. While not novel, this free feature is indicative of growing industry attention paid to server and application insight.
Avoiding Alerts Overload from Microservices: Sarah Wells at QCon London
At QCon London, Sarah Wells presented “Avoiding Alerts Overload from Microservices”, and cautioned that developers and operators must fundamentally change the way they think about monitoring when building a microservice system. Key takeaways included: build a system that can be supported; focus on ‘stuff that matters’ when creating monitoring and alerts; and cultivate and improve alerts.
Honeycomb - A Tool for Debugging Complex Systems
Honeycomb is a tool for observing and correlating events in distributed systems. It provides a different approach from existing tools like Zipkin in that it moves away from the single-request-tracing model to a more free-form model of collecting and querying data across layers and dimensions.
Adrian Cockcroft on Analyzing Response Time Distributions for Microservices
At the microXchg conference, held in Berlin, Adrian Cockcroft presented “Analyzing Response Time Distributions for Microservices”. Cockcroft demonstrated how the combination of his Spigo microservice architecture simulation tool and the online Guesstimate Monte Carlo method tool can be used to visualise and experimentally simulate request response times within a complicated microservice system.
Interview with Runscope on API Testing and Monitoring
Runscope, an API monitoring and testing vendor, announced the general availability of Live Traffic Alerts, a real time API performance monitoring solution for live production traffic for key API transactions. InfoQ used this opportunity to speak to Runscope about their vision and the value their platform brings to its consumers.
Splunk ITSI: Adaptive Thresholds and Anomaly Detection
In theory the operations team determines what the thresholds for warnings and alerts should be. But in practice, the operations team often have no idea what these values should be. Using machine learning techniques such as adaptive thresholds, Splunk ITSI solves this problem.
Leveraging Data Science to Improve Monitoring
At the recent devopsdays Amsterdam 2015, Patrick Roelke contended that monitoring still has lots of issues. Roelke believes that data science can help by eliminating static thresholds and coalescing information from various data sources into a single metric. The talk included a quick overview of monitoring tools that leverage data science: Kale, Bosun and AnomalyDetection.
Weaveworks Release ‘Weave Scope’ for Container and Microservice Monitoring
Weaveworks, creators of the Weave Docker virtual networking solution, have released a pre-alpha version of 'Weave Scope', an open source developer-focused container monitoring tool. Scope automatically generates a map of containers, enabling developers to visualise, monitor, and control applications by using the information exposed to drive deployment and operational decisions.
Amazon CloudWatch Supports JSON Logs and Integrates AWS CloudTrail
Shortly after releasing the AWS CloudTrail Processing Library (CPL), Amazon Web Services has also integrated AWS CloudTrail with Amazon CloudWatch Logs to enable alarms and respective "notifications from CloudWatch, triggered by specific API activity captured by CloudTrail". The implied support for monitoring JSON-formatted logs has recently been officially released as well.
Amazon CloudWatch Gains Log Monitoring and Storage
Amazon CloudWatch recently gained log file monitoring and storage for application, operating system and custom logs and meanwhile enhanced support for Microsoft Windows Server to cover a wider variety of log sources.
3scale Targets API Consumers with APITools Offering
3scale launched APITools in the month of April this year targeted at API consumers. InfoQ spoke to 3scale management regarding motivation and underlying technology among other things and walked away with some interesting insights as well as upcoming initiatives to involve the community.
Q&A with LiquidPlanner CEO Liz Pearce - Card View Release
LiquidPlanner, a PPM tool, added features like card view to make it suitable for agile teams. InfoQ spoke to Liz Pearce, CEO of LiquidPlanner to explore more about tool and its functionalities.
Discussion on Nagios Fitness for Purpose
At a recent London DevOps meetup, Andy Sykes launched a debate on whether Nagios, a well-known application that offers monitoring and alerting services, should be replaced with a better solution. Laurie Denness, from Etsy, argued in a reply that Nagios and its ecosystem still are a great solution in the monitoring and alerting arena.
