The Cloud Moved Your Monitoring Cheese

Ken Ahrens

Ken Ahrens Background• Most of my career with monitoring vendors– New Relic, CA, and startup ILC (Rockwell Collins)

• Also worked on Developer/QA efficiency– API Virtualization and Testing

• Lived in Atlanta for 19 years– Proud papa of 5 children

Agenda• History of Monitoring– Infrastructure Monitoring– Application Monitoring

• Along comes THE CLOUD– There went your cheese– Now what!?

History of MonitoringTomorrow

BusinessToday

Users

2000’s

Apps

80’s - 90’s

Time

Server and Networks

Valu

e

Sources: Back to the Future, New Relic

Infrastructure Monitoring• FCAPS (ISO Standard)– Fault– Configuration– Accounting– Performance– Security

• Servers are your friends

Source: Infoworld

Infrastructure Monitoring Vendors

Source: SNMP Center

Application Monitoring• Manually ARM your code• Top-down approach– Application Components/Map– Transaction Traces – Timers, Errors

• DevOps – Identify impact of a release

Cross-Infrastructure

Real User Monitoring

Source: Could They Do It? O’Reilly Complete Web Monitoring

That Cloud Thing Everyone Is Talking About

Source: The Onion

Is cloud primetime yet?

Source: The Enterprisers Project Source: SRG Research

Source: Microsoft

Monitoring Priority in Cloud• IaaS– High CPU is good, otherwise you’re wasting $$

• PaaS– APM is a must-have – you cannot see the server!

• SaaS– May still be able to collect metrics via API

End User Experience• On average 87% of the response time is in the Browser• Your monitoring strategy should start with user experience

Source: The Performance Golden Rule

How do you do that?

Real end-user monitoring• Instrument website

– Page timings and errors– Classify by browser & geo– Track AJAX calls– Remote session traces

• Languages: JavaScript

Synthetic monitoring• Availability

– 24/7 checks against the site– HTTP Response Codes

• Performance– Baseline for trending analysis– From multiple locations

Software Analytics• Consolidate events from monitoring agents• Enrich with business context• Make data-driven decisions• Focus on real-time

Case Study: WiseCracker

PaaS: Built on Shopify

Browser Monitoring

Synthetic Monitoring

Software Analytics