Monitorama Portland 2014 Portland, OR 2014-05-05 to 2014-05-07 When I joined a startup already in progress as their first ops hire, what monitoring existed was a twisty maze of half-measures. The devteam dreaded oncall, and our Mean Time To Lost Sleep was way too low. Improving visibility into our infrastructure and application performance required trying new tools and changing how we thought about what we were measuring. Join me for a tragicomic journey from the vale of blissful ignorance through the straits of Nagios and into the mountains of Graphite. Thrill! to the victories. Cringe! at the rewards of hubris. Share! your own insights, because this tale never really ends.

1. From Zero To Visibility
Bridget Kromhout

2. 8thbridge.com
small social commerce startup
acquired in the last month by Fluid, Inc.
small devteam
I am the ops team
http://www.thedirtbox.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/ping-pongart.jpg

3. twisty maze of little shell scripts
http://www.pcgameshardware.de/screenshots/1280x1024/2007/07/CA01.jpg

4. time-consuming to understand
difficult to modify
doesn’t scale
artisanal monitoring?!
http://shop.bespokebacon.com/images/bespoke-logo.final(3).png

5. New Relic
pros:
nice graphs
application-level view
good error analysis
cons:
slow to update
many false-positive alerts
high prices (better now)

6. motivating change
http://99designs.
com/illustrations/contests/illustration-
pagerduty-161025/entries

7. as hideous as you remember

8. “Horrendous interface”
“Well, it’s more “old” than anything
else. At least everything is in the
same place as you left it because it’s
been the same since 1912.”
https://laur.ie/blog/2014/02/why-ill-be-letting-nagios-live-on-a-bit-longer-thank-you-very-much/
not alone!

9. “Sensu has so many
moving parts that I
wouldn’t be able to
sleep at night unless
I set up a Nagios
instance to make
sure they were all
running.”
who watches the RabbitMQ?
-- @murphy_slaw (via @lozzd)
http://images.sodahead.com/profiles/0/0/0/5/1/6/6/3/9/Watchmen-trademark-symbol-62141795529.jpeg
http://portertech.ca/images/2011-11-01/sensu-diagram.png

10. hating on nagios: the middle years

11. “hadoop does not suffer from a paucity of configuration options”
http://jaganesundar.wordpress.com/2011/12/05/installing-and-configuring-hadoop-0-20-205-using-it-rpm/
monitor all the ports?!
best way to monitor HBase:
hbck: the HBase consistency checker
nagios -> bash script -> parsing output of hbck
http://www.ymc.ch/en/how-to-monitor-hbase-health-by-nagios

12. http://modiinhub.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/logo-mongodb-tagline.png

14. “Cyber” monday: 1988 called; wants its word back.

15. wow. such nosql. very webscale.
“a single write operation holds the lock exclusively, and
no other read or write operations may share the lock.”

16. “If it moves, we track it. Sometimes we’ll
draw a graph of something that isn’t
moving yet, just in case it decides to make
a run for it.” Ian Malpass, Etsy
http://codeascraft.com/2011/02/15/measure-anything-measure-everything/

17. the (former) state of our graphite & statsd
● Graphite 0.9.9
○ hand-rolled
○ over 2 years old
○ missing new features (Consolidate by!)
● StatsD was newish, but…
○ hand-rolled
○ running in a screen session
○ on a special snowflake box

18. http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/736x/68/c2/9d/68c29deb72bad94cd4e3c1aa0f3cdcd8.jpg
this is wrong tool. never use this.

19. Community cookbooks?
● StatsD
○ https://github.com/librato/statsd-cookbook
● Graphite ones good, but…
○ focus on Apache (we use nginx)
○ we haven’t moved to Chef 11 (gasp!)

20. when in doubt: tcpdump is your friend
http://blog.johngoulah.com/2012/10/looking-under-the-covers-of-statsd/

21. carbon-aggravator (between 0.9.10 & 0.9.12)
# If set true, metric received will be forwarded to
# DESTINATIONS in addition to
# the output of the aggregation rules. If set false
# the carbon-aggregator will
# only ever send the output of aggregation.
FORWARD_ALL = True

22. carbonate: A+++ would clone again
whisper-fill.py
backfill datapoints between whisper files

23. life as a third wheel party
thresholds: because not every outage is abrupt
normal traffic
decision
to turn off
decision
to turn
back on
accidental removal

24. open-source error reporting

25. all the things
StatsD
Application-level error
analysis
Alarms for autoscaling
Timers &
counters
Log & host-level
Hadoop & HBase
visualization
MongoDB
Graphs
Time-series
data graphing
client-side
plugins
Threshold-based alarmsDashboard
external checks

26. What’s next?
http://blog.xebia.fr/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/file-logstash-es-kibana.png

27. what even is ideal monitoring solution
http://www.quickmeme.com/img/f5/f512ff9bee084263df5571d3c81388019dcb063173e1dbcfa2babac9274576b6.jpg
❏ finds real problems
❏ actionable alerting
❏ usable by all
❏ …?

28. questions; comments; whatnot
Twitter: @bridgetkromhout
Email: bridget@kromhout.org
In person: DevOps Days Minneapolis
(devopsdays.org)