What you should think about putting in webops dashboards. There's a lot of discussion that isn't annotated in the slide stack -- so you're missing a lot without audio.

1. Dashboards
/ for web operations
Friday, June 17, 2011

2. Who is this guy?
Author of “Scalable Internet Architectures”
Pearson, ISBN: 067232699X
Contributor to “Web Operations”
O’Reilly, ISBN: 978-1-4493-7744-1
Founder of OmniTI, Message Systems, Fontdeck, & Circonus
I like to tackle problems that are “always on” and “always growing.”
I am an Engineer
A practitioner of academic computing.
IEEE member and Senior ACM member.
On the Editorial Board of ACM’s Queue magazine.
Friday, June 17, 2011

3. What’s in a dashboard
• instrumentation
• actionable information
• relevant to both your purview and your purpose
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4. What’s not in a dashboard
• controls
• via a dashboard you observe, not influence
• I’ll arbitrarily redefine:
“dashboard” as not having controls, and
“console” as having them
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5. Your purpose
• Your purpose is to make
your company’s web business
operate.
(hence: “web operations”)
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6. Your purpose
• Your purpose is to make
your company’s web business
operate.
(hence: “web operations”)
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7. Your purpose
• ensure business success
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8. Understanding your purpose
• who defines business success?
• shareholders, ultimately
• the board of directors, in their stead
• the CEO on an operational, day-to-day basis
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9. Understanding your purpose
• Assuming your CEO is doing a good job
• the executive team understands these metrics
• Assuming the executive team is competent
• their reports understand these metrics
(at least the pertinent ones)
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10. Pertinent == Problematic
• You enable all aspects of the business
• All these metrics are pertinent
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11. But why?
• You could simply track stuff that is in your purview.
• Why not?
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12. Technology
• As a technology operations group,
you have the technology.
We can rebuild him.
We have the technology.
We can make him better than he was.
Better...stronger...faster.
- Oscar Goldman
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13. Why is our technology better?
• Simply put: MTTD
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14. Now, what about your purview?
• Obviously monitoring the business is useful.
• However, you cannot directly affect business.
• You indirectly affect it by operating the web portion.
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15. What can you change?
• You can control:
• releases,
• performance,
• stability,
• computing resources,
• networking,
• and availability.
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16. Visualize!
• All this information must be presented visually.
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17. Text.
• Text is incredibly useful.
• Consider: deployment.
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18. Code Deployment
r82394 (by corey) 1h 7m 9s ago
previous deploy 1h 42m 18s ago
11 deploys today
Friday, June 17, 2011

19. Code Deployment
r82394 15:03:14 2011/06/15
previous deploy 1h 42m 18s ago
11 deploys today
Friday, June 17, 2011

20. Code Deployment
r82394 (by corey) 1h 7m 9s ago
previous deploy 1h 42m 18s ago
11 deploys today
Friday, June 17, 2011

21. Code Deployment
r82394 (by corey) 1h 7m 9s ago
previous deploy 1h 42m 18s ago
11 deploys today
Friday, June 17, 2011

22. Code Deployment
r82394 (by corey) 1h 7m 9s ago
previous deploy 1h 42m 18s ago
11 deploys today
Friday, June 17, 2011

23. Code Deployment
r82394 (by corey) 1h 7m 9s ago
previous deploy 1h 42m 18s ago
11 deploys today
Friday, June 17, 2011

24. Text.
• Numbers are trickier.
• So many representations from which to choose.
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25. Beware
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26. Beware
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27. Beware
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28. Beware
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29. Gauges require understanding
• Gauges imply a deep understanding of
• bounds, and
• tolerances
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30. Gauges require understanding
• General advice
• If the range will ever change, don’t use gauges
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31. Gauges require understanding
• Great for:
• percentages,
• temperature,
• power per rack,
• bandwidth per uplink
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32. Gauges require understanding
• Bad for:
• IOPS,
• current visitor counts,
• requests per second,
• bandwidth overall
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33. Graphs are often better
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34. Even little ones
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35. Think relatively
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36. Think relatively
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37. Users live all around the world
• Users live just about everywhere
• “Where?” is a useful question
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38. Geolocation
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39. Geolocation is interesting
• to marketing
• to legal
• (okay to everyone)
• but, not so useful to operations
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40. Geolocation is interesting
• perhaps more interesting
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41. Geolocation is interesting
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42. Geolocation
• Internet location != geo-political location
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43. ASN location
• The closest thing to geo-political boundaries is peering
-bash-4.0$ /usr/sbin/bgpctl show rib 66.78.236.243
flags: * = Valid, > = Selected, I = via IBGP, A = Announced
origin: i = IGP, e = EGP, ? = Incomplete
flags destination gateway lpref med aspath origin
66.78.236.0/22 64.202.119.7 100 0 23352 4436 2914 3356 32778 i
### ASN 327778 is “Smart City Networks, L.P.”
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44. ASN location
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45. What about the business?
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46. What about the business?
Authorizations : Hard Failed : Soft Failed : Releases
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47. Is that all?
• Hells no.
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48. It’s all about real-time
• Everything so far is old hat (maybe)
• Every business unit has visualizations like this
• You need to combine the data
• You need to make it real-time
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49. Thanks
• web demo ensues....
Friday, June 17, 2011