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Monitoring on a budget
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C J Silverio
June 03, 2016
Programming
2
290
Monitoring on a budget
How npm does monitoring & metrics on a budget.
C J Silverio
June 03, 2016
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Transcript
monitoring on a budget
a few animated gifs with the Twelfth Doctor (0 cats)
C J Silverio vp of engineering, @ceejbot
let's talk npm by the numbers
205 million packages Tuesday 10K requests/sec
npm is 25 people 4 of us run the registry
when the company was formed 5 people total
you outsource many services when you're tiny
you pull them back in-house when you succeed
success is sometimes a catastrophe
npm's scale: runaway success npm's staff: wouldn't this be neat
mission: know this on a budget
None
2 questions: is the registry up? how well is it
performing?
is the registry up? monitoring
how well is it performing? metrics
monitoring
monitoring == pull ask questions that you know the right
answers for
Is this host up? Is this cert about to expire?
Is the DB replication keeping up?
if you get the wrong answer somebody gets paged
nagios state of the art in free
None
It's okay. We never look at it. It just triggers
Pager Duty.
nagios’s virtues: reliability & custom checks
goal: never page anybody
self-healing checks automate the fix if you can!
monitoring == unit tests a ratchet for continuous improvement
external monitoring ping services
you must monitor but that's just the start
monitoring tells you what it doesn't tell you why
metrics
Q: What's a metric? A: A name + a value
+ a time.
counter: it happened N times gauge: it's Y-sized right now
rate: it's happening N times/second timing: it took X milliseconds
metrics == push the app gives you numbers
emit from a service store in timeseries db query &
graph
the usual stack statsd ➜ graphite ➜ grafana
None
None
statsd uses UDP
Q: Why not send metrics over UDP? A: You care
about receiving them.
just try to install graphite
for-pay/SAAS services exist but I can't afford them
monitoring 400 processes right now 12+ GB of log data
a day
interlude: when should you pay?
convert the £$€ cost into engineer hours/month
pay when it's cheaper than investing an engineer (be honest
about the cost)
numbat was born “How hard can it be?” I said.
None
https://github.com/ numbat-metrics numbat - powered metrics
None
npm’s stack numbat ➜ influxdb ➜ grafana
var Emitter = require('numbat-emitter'); var emitter = new Emitter({ uri:
'tcp://localhost:3333', app: 'www', }); process.emit('metric', { name: 'request.latency', value: 30 }); process.emit('metric', { name: 'disk.used.percent', value: 36 }); process.emit('metric', { name: 'login' });
so easy to emit a metric that we just do
it any time something interesting happens
4000 metrics/sec from the registry
None
None
None
None
metrics ➜ alerts
Server handling expected traffic? Latency higher than normal? Error rate
higher than usual?
metrics comprise a data stream send the stream to more
than one place!
anomaly detection
recap time!
your web apps are backed by something
what's it up to? how do you know?
get data on what your services are up to
what: monitoring yes/no questions
why: metrics data changing over time
next: anomaly detection predictions & trends
automate don't require humans
npm install -g npm@latest @ceejbot on all the things npm
loves you