One of my jobs as a Site Reliability Engineer(SRE) is to ensure that our application has a solid monitoring system. You cannot guarantee reliabilit...
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Hi Molly, nice article! Consolidating monitoring tools is definitely a plus and for the on call people probably even something to preserve their sanity :D
On the note of consolidation and observability of a distributed system, have you had the chance to take a look at Honeycomb? I'd love to read your take on it.
I just looked at Honeycomb for the first time and it looks pretty nice! Couple things I consider when choosing a monitoring solution
Thanks for the reply!
NewRelic has a weird pricing models as well.
About HoneyComb, you should follow its CEO regardless, she's a very interesting voice in the observability/monitoring landscape: twitter.com/mipsytipsy
I think its Ruby client library is a still raw (they are a Go shop IIRC) but the idea behind it is super solid.
Oh yeah, I do follow her!!! She seems pretty awesome 😃
Good post. I have this issue, too... there are too many alerts that show up that are false positives, which causes us to not trust any of the alerts.
I'm going to check out DataDog. I've tried to use Azure Application Insights for this, but it gets expensive really quickly.
Nice post !
I'm happy to see we're not the only ones to use DataDog for our monitoring. We use it as a central console, and with a few Twilio Webhooks we are now able to have customized Voice Call & SMS alerting for whoever is on-call.
But still, you have to be careful and manage closely your DataDog setup, otherwise it will end up like all the others: clogged and false-alerting for pretty much everything. To avoid that, we conduct monthly review of the alerts, and tune them so they are most accurate possible :-)
Thanks!
So true, you definitely have to stay on top of all your alerts. I like the idea of a monthly review, I will keep that in mind. It is nice though when you do that monthly review you only have one place you have to go 😃
Good to see yet another SRE team taking ownership of monitoring! At HelloFresh we were into the same scenario, actually we had tons of infrastructure and product services w/out any sort of monitoring.
With our move to k8s, anything that runs on top if can leverage system metrics (CPU, Memory, Network etc...). Services whose expose HTTP endpoints at the k8s edge (ingress) can have RED metrics (Req, Err Duration) automatically. Since edge metrics are common we were able to automate away dashboards by creating one general allowing ppl to filter by service name. Automating alerts were also possible.
We are truly believers that w/out monitoring software ownership is not possible. Now on, incidents are much faster to be detected (MTTD) and recovered (MTTR).
We tune alerts religiously, TBH I don't even know how we could be flying w/out the monitoring we have nowadays
Right?! Once you have a good monitoring system in place its hard to envision life without it!
Some very good points on why having detailed visibility into an application is important, thanks Molly!
Even we were exploring Datadog which is comprehensive indeed but quickly ends up being very expensive since it bills one on the number of hosts / APMs.
For small / medium scale organizations, cost is a major factor so we eventually discovered AppSignal that bills you only on number of requests (both web & background) than hosts with very effective alerting & a 30 day retention plus their pricing is very affordable. They also have lots of 3rd party add-ons integrated right out of the box plus you can always add custom webhooks should you need more.
The downside? It's currently available only for Ruby / Elixir apps.
PS: They've a fantastic sales & engineering team who'll help you with any kind of queries that's worth checking out.
Awesome! Thanks for the alternative suggestion and insight 😊
I've built a website monitoring tool that might be of interest to some of you, take a look here