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Data Visualization in the Trenches
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Abe Stanway
May 17, 2013
Programming
5
710
Data Visualization in the Trenches
This talk was given at Bocoup's OpenVis Conf in Boston.
Abe Stanway
May 17, 2013
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Transcript
Abe Stanway @abestanway Data visualization in the trenches
None
1.5 Billion page views $117 Million of goods sold 950
thousand users
1.5 Billion page views $117 Million of goods sold 950
thousand users (in December)
Text We practice continuous deployment.
de • ploy /diˈploi/ Verb To release your code for
the world to see, hopefully without breaking the Internet
250+ committers, everyone deploys.
Day one: Deploy.
None
30+ DEPLOYS A DAY
Text “30 deploys a day? Is that safe?”
Text Yes, with the proper tooling.
Text Every engineer must have a finger on the pulse
of the system.
Text How do you make an entire web stack “consumable”
to a handful of engineers?
Text More information Quickly consumable More abstraction
p
None
Text Real time error logging
Text No abstraction. Fluffy information. Easy to consume.
“Not all things that break throw errors.” - Oscar Wilde
1. ssh to server 2. poke around for the log
files 3. try to remember what they mean 4. try to scroll back in time to find when they started acting up. 5. repeat
Text No abstraction. Fluffy information.
Text ...but hard to get at. Lots of friction means
not easily consumable.
Text Bump up a layer of abstraction.
1. create a graph 2. look at the graph 3.
?? 4. profit!!
StatsD
StatsD::increment(“foo.bar”)
If it moves, graph it!
If it doesn’t move, graph it anyway (it might make
a run for it)
None
Text Some abstraction. Denser information.
Text ...still hard to get at en masse.
Text Bump up a layer of abstraction.
DASHBOARDS!
Hang out with the dashboards after you push.
None
[1358731200, 20] [1358731200, 20] [1358731200, 20] [1358731200, 20] [1358731200, 20]
[1358731200, 20] [1358731200, 20] [1358731200, 20] [1358731200, 60]
DASHBOARDS x 250000 !
None
“...but there are also unknown unknowns - there are things
we do not know we don’t know.”
Text Slightly denser information is negated by the deluge.
Text The majority remains unconsumable.
Text Bump up a layer of abstraction.
SKYLINE
A real time anomaly detection system
None
Text Very abstract, harder to understand, but the effective information
density is massive.
Text Consumption is also increased by outsourcing it to the
machine.
Text Trust becomes an issue.
So you found an anomaly.
MAYBE THERE ARE OTHERS
Oculus: a metrics correlation system
None
Text A good tool adds “touch” to the system.
Text More “touch” means more intimacy with the stack.
Text A delicate balance between insight, consumptive capacity, and actionability.
Text More abstraction leads to less intimacy...
Text ...but greater information density.
@abestanway
[email protected]
Abe Stanway Data Engineer Thanks!