Observing Your Go Services

"If a Go microservice falls down in the middle of a server farm, does my pager make a sound?"

If your service is automatically monitored, then the answer is "yes!". But what if your service *isn't* monitored yet? Or what if your monitors alert you when the server is offline, but not on subtler problems like latency spikes or CPU load?

Fortunately, there's a quick and easy way to get high-resolution metrics for monitoring your services. The Go standard library now contains the basic building blocks for application tracing. When you combine these tools with Veneur, a pure Go distributed metrics aggregator, you can easily answer the questions you care about, like "Which servers are currently running near maximum capacity?", or "Can our infrastructure handle tomorrow's product launch?".

Transcript

1. Observing Your Go Services Aditya Mukerjee Observability Engineer at Stripe GopherCon 2018 Denver
2. Observability measures how well internal states of a system can be inferred from knowledge of its external outputs @chimeracoder
3. Go is used to build…. •Distributed systems •Reliable software •“The Cloud™” @chimeracoder
4. 1. What should I observe or monitor? 2. How do I measure and monitor those things in Go? 3. What does the future of Go observability look like? @chimeracoder
5. Let’s Create an API •Return a list of all Twitter followers •Record a copy to the database •Distributed! @chimeracoder API API API DB
6. Service-Level Agreement: What we promise our clients @chimeracoder Service-Level Indicators: Data used to evaluate the SLA
7. Service Indicators •Rate: Number of requests received •Errors: Number of responses written, broken down by HTTP status •Duration: Distribution of response latency @chimeracoder
8. Every monitor involves a service-level indicator* @chimeracoder *for sufficiently broad definitions of “service”
9. @chimeracoder Metrics, logs, and request traces are used to provide greater visibility beyond our service indicators
10. Define and measure your service indicator metrics @chimeracoder
11. Thank you! Aditya Mukerjee @chimeracoder https://veneur.org #veneur on Freenode