Knowing Your Application

An introduction to the use of Application Metrics to help you gain insight into the activity of your applications.

This talk was given at the an evening seminar at Dynabyte in Stockholm, Sweden in 2014.

Transcript

1. Knowing your application
2. I’m Leonard Axelsson from MOJANG
3. story time
4. a long time ago...
5. at a company far far away...
6. many users
7. a realtime system
8. worries about performance...
9. data
10. data data data data data data
11. data data data data data data data data data data data data
12. Java, csv and Excel?
13. too much work.
14. Graphite
15. data data data data data data data data data data data data
16. 4 hours...
17. data data data data data data data data data
19. something happens when you add time to the data
20. A big change
21. A drastic increase
22. we gained understanding
23. our managers gained understanding
24. a common language was created
25. now
26. using Graphite DAILY
27. 352464 metrics
28. Successful vs failed logins
29. Server capacity
30. Scrolls AI ratings
31. Realms API requests
32. look at how your application is interacting with the world
33. prefer application metrics over system data
34. Graphite
35. measure collect visualize
36. Graphite •Whisper stores data on disk •Carbon receives & supplies metrics •Graphite web for graphs & dashboards
37. server2.coolapp.transactions.count Metric names
38. Sending metrics echo "server2.coolapp.transactions.count 5 1390238108\n" | nc localhost 2003
39. server2/ coolapp/ transactions/ count.wsp Metrics on disk
40. Metrics on disk •Fixed size files configured by you •you decide how long and at what granularity you store metric data
41. let’s take a look
42. Recap •use labels for readability •use nonNegativeDerivative with counters •wildscards work great with sumSeries
43. Recap •a 2nd y axis is great when comparing values on a big scale •you can never have too many dashboards
44. Recap •rawData lets you take a look at the data •use drawAsInfinite to “tag” events
45. Tools •Coda Hale’s metrics library for Java •Etsy’s statsd for stats aggregation •and many more
46. Graphite turns data into information
47. in closing
48. Graphite isn’t the point
49. insight into your application is
50. graphing metrics over time gives context
51. seeing the same graphs over and over gives you familiarity
52. visualization spur conversation
53. it gives you a hunger for more
54. you learn to recognize patterns
55. you start noticing when things aren’t working
56. measure everything
57. it’s your job to know your application
58. Thanks!
59. xlson.com leo@xlson.com twitter.com/xlson