Episode 7: The Exact Opposite of a Job Creator

Monitoring in the entire technical world is terrible and continues to be a giant, confusing mess. How do you monitor? Are you monitoring things the wrong way? Why not hire a monitoring consultant!         

Today, we’re talking to monitoring consultant Mike Julian, who is the editor of the Monitoring Weekly newsletter and author of O’Reilly’s Practical Monitoring. He is the voice of monitoring.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Observability comes from control theory and monitoring is for what we can anticipate
• Industry’s lack of interest and focus on monitoring
• When there’s an outage, why doesn’t monitoring catch it?” Unforeseen things.
• Cost and failure of running tools and systems that are obtuse to monitor
• Outsource monitoring instead of devoting time, energy, and personnel to it
• Outsourcing infrastructure means you give up some control; how you monitor and manage systems changes when on the Cloud
• CloudWatch: Where metrics go to die
• Distributed and Implemented Tracing: Tracing calls as they move through a system
• Serverless Functions: Difficulties experienced and techniques to use
• Warm vs. Cold Start: If a container isn't up and running, it has to set up database connections
• Monitoring can't fix a bad architecture; it can't fix anything; improve the application architecture
• Visibility of outages and pain perceived; different services have different availability levels

Links:

• Mike Julian
• Monitoring Weekly
• Copy Construct on Twitter
• Baron Schwartz on Twitter
• Charity Majors on Twitter
• Redis
• Kubernetes
• Nagios
• Datadog
• New Relic
• Sumo Logic
• Prometheus
• Honeycomb
• Honeycomb Blog
• CloudWatch
• Zipkin
• X-Ray
• Lambda
• DynamoDB
• Pinboard
• Slack
• Digital Ocean