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
   

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2. I’m Leonard Axelsson
   from MOJANG
   

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3. story time
   

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4. a long time
   ago...
   

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5. at a company
   far far away...
   

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6. many users
   

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7. a realtime
   system
   

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8. worries about
   performance...
   

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9. data
   

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10. data
    data
    data
    data
    data
    data
    

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11. data
    data
    data
    data
    data
    data
    data
    data
    data
    data
    data
    data
    

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12. Java, csv
    and Excel?
    

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13. too much
    work.
    

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14. Graphite
    

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15. data
    data
    data
    data
    data
    data
    data
    data
    data
    data
    data
    data
    

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16. 4 hours...
    

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17. data
    data
    data
    data
    data
    data
    data
    data
    data
    

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19. something happens when
    you add time to the data
    

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20. A big change
    

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21. A drastic increase
    

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22. we gained
    understanding
    

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23. our managers gained
    understanding
    

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24. a common language
    was created
    

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25. now
    

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26. using Graphite
    DAILY
    

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27. 352464 metrics
    

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28. Successful vs failed logins
    

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29. Server capacity
    

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30. Scrolls AI ratings
    

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31. Realms API requests
    

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32. look at how your
    application is interacting
    with the world
    

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33. prefer application metrics
    over system data
    

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34. Graphite
    

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35. measure
    collect
    visualize
    

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36. Graphite
    •Whisper stores data on disk
    •Carbon receives & supplies metrics
    •Graphite web for graphs & dashboards
    

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37. server2.coolapp.transactions.count
    Metric names
    

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38. Sending metrics
    echo "server2.coolapp.transactions.count 5 1390238108\n"
    | nc localhost 2003
    

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39. server2/
    coolapp/
    transactions/
    count.wsp
    Metrics on disk
    

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40. Metrics on disk
    •Fixed size files configured by you
    •you decide how long and at what
    granularity you store metric data
    

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41. let’s take a look
    

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42. Recap
    •use labels for readability
    •use nonNegativeDerivative with
    counters
    •wildscards work great with sumSeries
    

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43. Recap
    •a 2nd y axis is great when comparing
    values on a big scale
    •you can never have too many
    dashboards
    

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44. Recap
    •rawData lets you take a look at the data
    •use drawAsInfinite to “tag” events
    

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45. Tools
    •Coda Hale’s metrics library for Java
    •Etsy’s statsd for stats aggregation
    •and many more
    

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46. Graphite turns data
    into information
    

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47. in closing
    

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48. Graphite
    isn’t the point
    

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49. insight into your
    application is
    

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50. graphing metrics over
    time gives context
    

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51. seeing the same graphs
    over and over gives you
    familiarity
    

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52. visualization spur
    conversation
    

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53. it gives you a hunger for
    more
    

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54. you learn to recognize
    patterns
    

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55. you start noticing when
    things aren’t working
    

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56. measure
    everything
    

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57. it’s your job to know
    your application
    

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58. Thanks!
    

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59. xlson.com
    leo@xlson.com
    twitter.com/xlson
    

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