Leon Fayer discusses how monitoring is a key part of DevOps and improving systems. He outlines what aspects systems, applications, databases, and business processes should be monitored. Fayer then provides a case study example of how one company traced a revenue issue to a problem with their email system by taking a top-down approach and correlating multiple metrics from traffic down through load time, databases, and email. Fayer emphasizes understanding the business and correlating different types of data to effectively monitor complex systems.

1. Improving DevOps
through better monitoring
Leon Fayer
@papa_fire

2. Who am I ?
• 20+ years of development and operations of large systems
• currently Vice President at OmniTI
• can be found online:
• @papa_fire
• http://fayerplay.com
• github:lfayer

3. So …
what is DevOps?

4. What is DevOps?
philosophy of collaboration

5. … and more
to enable business goals

6. Not DevOps
dev ops

7. Not DevOps either
devops

8. DevOps
devops

9. General consensus
Damon Edwards (http://dev2ops.org)

10. Missing link
Damon Edwards (http://dev2ops.org)

11. Finally, monitoring
enter monitoring

12. What to monitor?
“in God we trust
all others we monitor”

13. What to monitor specifically?
• systems
• databases
• application
• integration points
• performance
• user behavior
• business processes

14. Perfect quote
“ I don’t give a **** if the
datacenter is on fire as long as
I am still making money ”
- CEO

15. Example: Twitter
serves over 20 million unique visitors a day
… legendary for downtime
. servers are up and running
. HTTP checks return 200
. tweets lost

16. Why monitor?
• software is never perfect
• systems are more and more complex
• proactive is better than reactive
• external dependency worry
• …

17. Why really monitor?
things change

18. … and when things change
changes effect business

19. And now for real example
:case study:

20. Setting the stage
• online marketing company
• major e-commerce component
• 90+ million users
• 1 billion emails/months
• 300,000+ lines of code
• ~ 50 physical devices
• 5600+ metrics collected

21. It all starts with …

22. Let the hunt begin
revenue

23. Direct cause check
revenue + traffic

24. Going down the stack
revenue + traffic + load time

25. Still descending
revenue + traffic + load time + db

26. Got ya!
revenue + traffic + load time + db + email

27. Keys to monitoring
1. understand business
2. approach top-down
3. correlate data

28. For more tips & examples:
http://omniti.com/explains/monitoring-the-big-picture
Questions?