Monitoring Principles by Mr. William Notowidagdo

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DEVOPS INDONESIA
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DEVOPS INDONESIA
DEVOPS INDONESIA
DevOps Community in Indonesia
Jakarta, 28 Januari 2019
Monitoring Principles

2. Subjects
● Monitoring Anti-Patterns
● Monitoring Design Patterns

3. Introduction
● William Notowidagdo
● Head of Engineering at Ralali.com
● Past companies: Amazon Web Services, HarukaEdu, ...

4. An anti-pattern is
something that looks
like a good idea, but
which backfires badly
when applied.
—Jim Coplien

5. Anti Pattern #1: Tool Obsession
● There are no silver bullets
● Sometimes, you really do have to build it
● Avoid Cargo-Culting tools
Image taken from https://refactoring.guru/design-patterns/prototype

6. Anti-Pattern #2: Monitoring-as-a-job
● Monitoring is not a job -- it's a skill
● And it's a skill everyone on your team should have

7. Anti-Pattern #3: Checkbox Monitoring
When you have monitoring systems for the sake of saying you
have them
Common signs:
● The service still goes down without your knowing why
● You find yourself constantly ignoring alerts
● You are checking systems for metrics every 5 minutes

8. Anti-Pattern #3: Checkbox Monitoring (cont.)
To fix this anti-pattern
● Monitor what does "working" actually mean
● OS metrics aren't very useful -- for alerting
● Collect your metrics more often

9. Anti-Pattern #4: Using Monitoring as a Crutch
● You're constantly adding more monitoring to a service
● Don't forget the next step: fixing the problems
Image taken from https://vectorstock.com/15312737

10. Anti-Pattern #5: Manual Configuration
● "Can you add this to monitoring?"
● Services should self-register
● You should be able to quickly configure new checks/nodes

11. Design patterns
are typical
solutions to
common problems
in software design
monitoring.

12. Pattern #1: Composable Monitoring
Use multiple specialized tools and couple them loosely together,
forming a monitoring "platform"

13. Pattern #2: Start from the User Perspective
● Start monitoring as close to the user as possible
● "How will these metrics show me the user impact?"

14. Pattern #3: Buy, Not Build
● You're (probably) not an expert at architecting these tools
● SaaS allows you focus on the Company's product

15. Pattern #4: Continual Improvement
World-class isn't achieved in a week

16. Thank you
Now it's time for Q&A