Keeping a modern bank online

Monzo is a bank serving over 2 million customers in the UK. Unlike other banks, Monzo is 100% online, so it's critically important that our systems are too. Hear what it takes to keep the bank online and continue to provide world-class service levels to its customers.

1. Keeping a modern bank online ⚡ Chris Evans Platform / On-call Lead @evnsio
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7. So how do you keep a modern bank online?
8. Monitoring and Alerting On-call Incident Response @evnsio
9. Monitoring and Alerting Making sure we know what’s going on
10. Monzo Platform @evnsio
11. Monitor liberally; alert judiciously Monetary Costs Human Costs @evnsio
12. Monitoring liberally Physical DCs Cloud Infrastructure Kubernetes Monzo Services Social Media Customer Queries Alerts Prometheus Monitoring @evnsio
13. ~8000 unique scrape targets @evnsio
14. 42 million active time series @evnsio
15. 1.7 million samples per second @evnsio
16. Shared Dashboards @evnsio
17. Integrated Metrics @evnsio
18. Aim for alerts that are sensitive and specific @evnsio
19. ✅ Sensitive ❌ Specific These go off all the time. When they go off, people typically ignore them Alerts Car Alarm ✅ Sensitive ✅ Specific When there’s an issue, they go off quickly. When they go off, people pay attention and leave a building. Building Alarm @evnsio
20. Decay Ownership Classification Routing Globals (Some of!) Our Alert Issues @evnsio
21. Alerts in Version Control Fetch alerts + reload @evnsio
22. Goal: Alert Zero @evnsio
23. On-call Building the team to support our systems
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26. Early Days @evnsio
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28. Expanding the Pool @evnsio
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30. Introducing Specialists @evnsio
31. Shadow rotations to encourage learning Runbooks to document the undocumented People on-call when it makes sense for you @evnsio
32. Incident Response Restoring service as fast as possible
33. response.pagerduty.com @evnsio
34. Incident Response Workflow
35. Monzo Incident ⚡
36. Bring as much as reasonably practical into the conversation @evnsio
37. Make it so easy to do the right thing that nobody would have reason to do otherwise @evnsio
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41. The Headline Post @evnsio
42. The Incident Doc @evnsio
43. The Comms Channel @evnsio
44. The Comms Channel @evnsio
45. @incident <command> ... @evnsio
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54. Integrating with PagerDuty @evnsio
56. ...and that’s how we keep Monzo online @evnsio github.com/monzo/response