Fabian Stäber, Instana - In recent years, we saw a great paradigm shift in software engineering away from static monolithic applications towards dynamic distributed horizontally scalable architectures. Docker is one of the key technologies enabling this development. This shift poses a lot of new challenges for application monitoring, ranging from practical issues (need for automation) to technical challenges (Docker networking) to organizational topics (blurring line between software engineers and operations) to fundamental questions (define what is an application). In this talk we show how Docker changed the way we do monitoring, how modern application monitoring systems work, and what future developments we expect.

1. Fabian Stäber, Instana
Monitoring in a
Microservices World
@fstabr

2. Docker's Impact on Software Architecture
Application
Service Service
Service
Service
Service
Service

3. Impact on Monitoring
Some things become easier
● Health checks are commodity
● Runtime platforms provide information on service orchestration
Some things become harder
● Dynamically changing environments
● Health checks are not sufficient to represent the application state

4. Metrics
What is it: Time Series Data
Which challenges does it solve:
SLO-based alerting, root cause
analysis
Watch out for: Aggregate
horizontally, relate vertically,
automation

5. Distributed Tracing
What is it: Distributed Call Tree
Which challenges does it solve:
Distributed system behavior, root
cause analysis
Watch out for: Automation,
grouping, overlay networks
Service Service
Service
Service
Service
Service

6. A "simple" example
Latency, 99th percentile:
120ms
What's an application?
Latency derived from
distributed tracing data
Navigate traces and metrics
for root cause analysis
Link additional data like
continuous profiles
Attach application
logs to slow calls

7. Organizational Challenges
● Continuous delivery / continuous
deployment
● New Roles: DevOps, SRE
● New requirements and
responsibilities for existing roles
○ Software developers own the
infrastructure deeper than ever
before

8. Summary
● Docker enables dynamic distributed scalable polyglot applications
● Requires new approach to monitoring
○ Automate as much as possible
○ Use new data like metrics and distributed traces
● Adapt your teams and roles to the new world

9. Fabian Stäber, Instana
@fstabr