Monitoring in the entire technical world is terrible and continues to be a giant, confusing mess. How do you monitor? Are you monitoring things the wrong way? Why not hire a monitoring consultant!         

Today, we’re talking to monitoring consultant Mike Julian, who is the editor of the Monitoring Weekly newsletter and author of O’Reilly’s Practical Monitoring. He is the voice of monitoring.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

Observability comes from control theory and monitoring is for what we can anticipate

Industry’s lack of interest and focus on monitoring

When there’s an outage, why doesn’t monitoring catch it?” Unforeseen things.

Cost and failure of running tools and systems that are obtuse to monitor

Outsource monitoring instead of devoting time, energy, and personnel to it

Outsourcing infrastructure means you give up some control; how you monitor and manage systems changes when on the Cloud

CloudWatch: Where metrics go to die

Distributed and Implemented Tracing: Tracing calls as they move through a system

Serverless Functions: Difficulties experienced and techniques to use

Warm vs. Cold Start: If a container isn't up and running, it has to set up database connections

Monitoring can't fix a bad architecture; it can't fix anything; improve the application architecture

Visibility of outages and pain perceived; different services have different availability levels

Links:

Mike Julian

Monitoring Weekly

Copy Construct on Twitter

Baron Schwartz on Twitter

Charity Majors on Twitter

Redis

Kubernetes

Nagios

Datadog

New Relic

Sumo Logic

Prometheus

Honeycomb

Honeycomb Blog

CloudWatch

Zipkin

X-Ray

Lambda

DynamoDB

Pinboard

Slack

Digital Ocean