Top-Down Approach to Monitoring

transcript

Top-Down Approach to MonitoringJuly 30, 2015

Tivoli Software acquired by IBM

Patrol Software acquired by BMC

Ethan Galstad creates a simple MS-DOS application designed to "ping" Novell Netware servers

“HOW to monitor?” is the primary question

https://www.bigpanda.io/monitoringscape/

Shifting from “How?” to “What?”

Bottom-Up Approach

Network Servers Apps

Overall System Health

Problem #1: Inflation of Tools

Problem #2: Inflation of “Whats”

Problem #3: Inflation of Alerts

We’re trying to answer a simple question:

Is our system in a healthy state?

No Alerts

Many Alerts Unhealthy System≠

≠ Healthy System

Healthy System =A system that continuously generates value for its users under a well known set of KPIs

Top-Down Approach

KPIs UX

Overall System Health Network Servers Apps

• Selective • Proactive

• Exhaustive • Reactive

Bottom-UpTop-Down

A key performance indicator (KPI) is a business metric used to evaluate factors that are crucial to the success of an organization. KPIs differ per organization;

Definition of KPI

Let’s play a game!

CPU Utilization # Clicks on a button

TemperatureThis is Sam

What does Sam’s company do?

We sought out a single indicator that closely approximated our most important activity: viewing. We discovered that a server-side metric related to playback starts (the act of “clicking play”) had both a predictable pattern and fluctuated significantly when UI/device/server problems were happening. The Netflix streaming pulse was created.

The Pulse of Netflix

http://techblog.netflix.com/2015/02/sps-pulse-of-netflix-streaming.html

We named it “SPS” for “starts per second”.

Healthy SPS Pattern

Unhealthy SPS Pattern

What’s so special about SPS?

• SPS is easy to understand by all stakeholders

• One metric that covers different point of failure: server problems, device problems, etc.

• Most important: it’s a clear KPI that indicates when user experience is compromised

But what about root cause analysis?

KPIs UX

Network Servers Apps

Github: need for speed

https://github.com/blog/1252-how-we-keep-github-fast

The most important factor in web application

design is responsiveness. And the first step

toward responsiveness is speed. But speed

within a web application is complicated.

Start from the Top:Response Times Dashboard

• Each row represented a different major component

• Clicking one of the rows allows you to dive in and see the mean, 98th percentile, and 99.9th percentile response times

Digging Deeper:Mission Control Bar

Total Time Render Time Cache & Database JS & CSS Size

And Deeper

Render Breakdown

SQL Query Viewer

Why talk about BigPanda?

Because Pandas are awesome!

BigPanda

Because.. • We’re not Netflix or Github: growing startup (7 devs, 1 full-time Ops)

• We feel the pain!

• Our KPIs are easy to describe and understand (especially if you’re an Ops person)

BigPanda

As a unified dashboard on top of all your

monitoring systems, and eventually a single

point of truth for production incidents, our data

pipeline has to be reliable and fast.

KPI: Low data pipeline latency

Pipeline Latency Metric

• Metric are sent from within the apps

• Stored in Graphite

• Sum of all the average latencies of all alerts that went through the pipeline

• Monitored by Nagios

• Very good indicator of possible service outage

• Must have for detection of SLA violation

• Very good indicator of performance bottlenecks (can be broken down to sub-pipelines / specific organizations etc)

• Simple and high-level: easy to explain to non-technical stakeholders (e.g. sales)

Pipeline Latency Metric

• Bottom-up approach (“monitor all the things”) is easier to start with, but soon enough leads to alert fatigue and disorientation.

• Top-down approach requires thought and custom instrumentation, but keeps you focused on what’s important.

• High level metrics can be complemented by low level metrics. Trying to deduce the former from the latter is futile.

• Take advantage of the rich monitoring landscape, but as means to an end. Don’t let the tools dictate to you what you need to measure.

• Monitoring is - first of all - about your business.

Questions?

Thanks!

Top-Down Approach to Monitoring

Technology