Velocity 2015 Amsterdam: Alerts overload
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Alerts Overload How to adopt a microservices architecture without being overwhelmed with noise Sarah Wells @sarahjwells
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Transcript of Velocity 2015 Amsterdam: Alerts overload
Alerts OverloadHow to adopt a microservices
architecture without being
overwhelmed with noise
Sarah Wells
@sarahjwells
Microservices make it worse
microservices (n,pl): an efficient device for
transforming business problems into distributed
transaction problems
@drsnooks
You have a lot more systems
45 microservices
45 microservices
3 environments
45 microservices
3 environments
2 instances for each service
45 microservices
3 environments
2 instances for each service
20 checks per service
45 microservices
3 environments
2 instances for each service
20 checks per service
running every 5 minutes
> 1,500,000 system checks
per day
Over 19,000 system
monitoring alerts in 50 days
Over 19,000 system
monitoring alerts in 50 days
An average of 380 per day
Functional monitoring is also an issue
12,745 response time/error
alerts in 50 days
12,745 response time/error
alerts
An average of 255 per day
Why so many?
http://devopsreactions.tumblr.com/post/122408751191/alerts-when-an-outage-starts
How can you make it better?
Quick starts: attack your problem
See our EngineRoom blog for more:
http://bit.ly/1PP7uQQ
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Think about monitoring from the start
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It's the business functionality you care about
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We care about whether published content made it to us
When people call our APIs, we care about speed
… we also care about errors
But it's the end-to-end that matters
https://www.flickr.com/photos/robef/16537786315/
You only want an alert where you need to take
action
If you just want information, create a dashboard or report
Make sure you can't miss an alert
Make the alert great
http://www.thestickerfactory.co.uk/
Build your system with support in mind
Transaction ids tie all microservices together
Healthchecks tell you whether a service is OK
GET http://{service}/__health
Healthchecks tell you whether a service is OK
GET http://{service}/__health
returns 200 if the service can run the healthcheck
Healthchecks tell you whether a service is OK
GET http://{service}/__health
returns 200 if the service can run the healthcheck
each check will return "ok": true or "ok": false
Synthetic requests tell you about problems early
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jted/5448635109
Use the right tools for the job
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There are basic tools you need
FT Platform: An internal PaaS
Service monitoring (e.g. Nagios)
Log aggregation (e.g. Splunk)
Graphing (e.g. Graphite/Grafana)
metrics:
reporters:
- type: graphite
frequency: 1 minute
durationUnit: milliseconds
rateUnit: seconds
host: <%= @graphite.host %>
port: 2003
prefix: content.<%= @config_env %>.api-policy-component.<%=
scope.lookupvar('::hostname') %>
Real time error analysis (e.g. Sentry)
Build other tools to support you
"I imagine most people do exactly
what I do - create a google filter to
send all Nagios emails straight to the
bin"
"Our screens have a viewing angle of
about 10 degrees"
"Our screens have a viewing angle of
about 10 degrees"
"It never seems to show the page I
want"
Dashing
Nagios chart
Built by Simon Gibbs
@simonjgibbs
Use the right communication channel
It's not email
Slack integration
Radiators everywhere
Cultivate your alerts
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Review the alerts you get
If it isn't
helpful, make
sure you don't
get sent it
again
Splunk Alert: PROD - MethodeAPIResponseTime5MAlert
Business Impact
The methode api server is slow responding to requests.
This might result in articles not getting published to the new
content platform or publishing requests timing out.
...
Splunk Alert: PROD - MethodeAPIResponseTime5MAlert
Business Impact
The methode api server is slow responding to requests.
This might result in articles not getting published to the new
content platform or publishing requests timing out.
...
…
Technical Impact
The server is experiencing service degradation because of
network latency, high publishing load, high bandwidth
utilization, excessive memory or cpu usage on the VM. This
might result in failure to publish articles to the new content
platform.
Splunk Alert: PROD Content Platform Ingester Methode
Publish Failures Alert
There has been one or more publish failures to the
Universal Publishing Platform. The UUIDs are listed below.
Please see the run book for more information.
_time transaction_id uuid
Mon Oct 12 07:43:54 2015 tid_pbueyqnsqe a56a2698-6e90-11e5-8608-a0853fb4e1fe
Splunk Alert: PROD Content Platform Ingester Methode
Publish Failures Alert
There has been one or more publish failures to the
Universal Publishing Platform. The UUIDs are listed below.
Please see the run book for more information.
_time transaction_id uuid
Mon Oct 12 07:43:54 2015 tid_pbueyqnsqe a56a2698-6e90-11e5-8608-a0853fb4e1fe
Splunk Alert: PROD Content Platform Ingester Methode
Publish Failures Alert
There has been one or more publish failures to the
Universal Publishing Platform. The UUIDs are listed below.
Please see the run book for more information.
_time transaction_id uuid
Mon Oct 12 07:43:54 2015 tid_pbueyqnsqe a56a2698-6e90-11e5-8608-a0853fb4e1fe
When you didn't get an alert
What would have told you about this?
Setting up an alert is part of fixing the problem
✔ code
✔ test
alerts
System boundaries are more difficult
Severin.stalder [CC BY-SA 3.0
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via
Wikimedia Commons
Make sure you would know if an alert stopped
working
Add a unit test
public void shouldIncludeTriggerWordsForPublishFailureAlertInSplunk() {
…
}
Deliberately break things
Chaos snail
The thing that sends you alerts need to be up and running
https://www.flickr.com/photos/davidmasters/2564786205/
What's happened to our alerts?
We turned off ALL emails from
system monitoring
Our two most important alerts
come in via our team slack
channel
We have dashboards for
our read APIs in Grafana
To summarise...
Build microservices
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About technology at the FT:
Look us up on Stack Overflow
http://bit.ly/1H3eXVe
Read our blog
http://engineroom.ft.com/
The FT on github
https://github.com/Financial-Times/
https://github.com/ftlabs
Questions?
