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Showing posts from July, 2017

Operational Metrics and Alerts for Distributed Software Systems

This post will be about operational metrics and alerts for distributed software systems. What do I mean by that? I mean the metrics and alerts that allow operations personel to detect failure of of a distributed software system and helps them to quickly diagnose what is wrong. Metrics The metrics are measurements of characteristics of the system collected at regular(ish) intervals and stored somewhere for processing - rendering into graphs, triggering alert notifications, etc. Metrics can be divided into 3 categories: input metrics, output metrics, and process metrics. Input metrics are measures of the inputs to the system, for example, the number of user requests, counts of particular characteristics of the requests - where they are from, how large the request data is, counts of particular features in the request (for example, which resources/items/products are being asked for). Output metrics are measures of the output of the system. Examples of these would include orders s