What It Means to Be a Site Reliability Engineer According to a Survey from Catchpoint
Site Reliability Engineering intersects software engineering with IT Operations and is an approach created at Google in 2003 and described in detail in their 2016 book, Site Reliability Engineering, How Google Runs Production Systems. Digital experience intelligence provider, Catchpoint, surveyed 416 Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) with the goal of understanding what it means to be a SRE.
Monitoring Microservices at Scale at Crisp
Crisp’s engineering team shared their experience in monitoring their microservices stack. Vigil, their open sourced project in Rust, is a set of pull/push probes to collect health data with support for multiple languages, a status dashboard and integration with some external alerting tools.
How Observability Impacts Testing: Q&A with Amy Phillips at QCon London
Observability gives you a picture of the system’s current health and can replace certain types of testing. For low-risk application areas you can rely on observability instead of testing, provided you have continuous delivery that provides fast feedback and allows you to release changes quickly.
Monitoring Distributed Task Queues at MeilleursAgents
MeilleursAgents, a website that lets property sellers list and get an estimated price of their property, shared details of how their Celery-based distributed task queue is monitored. A combination of Python, StatsD, Bucky, Graphite and Grafana form the pipeline to monitor task lifecycle and execution rates.
How MakeMyTrip Monitors Its Large-Scale E-Commerce Website
MakeMyTrip, an online travel company, talks about their monitoring philosophy and setup in a series of articles. The hybrid infrastructure is monitored across the stack by mostly open source tools.
Monitoring Cloudflare's Global Network Using Prometheus
Matt Bostock’s SRECON 2017 Europe talk covers how Prometheus, a metric-based monitoring tool, is used to monitor CDN, DNS and DDoS mitigation provider CloudFlare’s globally distributed infrastructure and network.
Amazon CloudWatch Dashboards Gains API and CloudFormation Support
Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently added programmatic creation and manipulation of CloudWatch dashboards and widgets to support use cases such as dynamic resource lifecycle tracking and consistent cross-account dashboard maintenance.
NGINX Releases Microservices Platform, OpenShift Ingress Controller, and Service Mesh Preview
NGINX Inc has released the NGINX Application Platform which aims to be a “one stop shop” for microservice developers; a Kubernetes Ingress Controller solution for load balancing on the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform; and an implementation of NGINX as a service proxy for the Istio service mesh control plane.
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.
