Hightail express fails how to#
Hightail express fails software#
Hightail express fails code#

If an employee is at work, a page interrupts their workflow. Paging a human is a quite expensive use of an employee’s time. Unless you’re performing security auditing on very narrowly scoped components of a system, you should never trigger an alert simply because 'something seems a bit weird.' When the system isn’t able to automatically fix itself, we want a human to investigate the alert, determine if there’s a real problem at hand, mitigate the problem, and determine the root cause of the problem. Monitoring and alerting enables a system to tell us when it’s broken, or perhaps to tell us what’s about to break. Because this book focuses on the engineering domains in which SRE has particular expertise, we won’t discuss these applications of monitoring here. System monitoring is also helpful in supplying raw input into business analytics and in facilitating analysis of security breaches. Conducting ad hoc retrospective analysis (i.e., debugging) Our latency just shot up what else happened around the same time? Building dashboards Dashboards should answer basic questions about your service, and normally include some form of the four golden signals (discussed in The Four Golden Signals). There are many reasons to monitor a system, including: Analyzing long-term trends How big is my database and how fast is it growing? How quickly is my daily-active user count growing? Comparing over time or experiment groups Are queries faster with Acme Bucket of Bytes 2.72 versus Ajax DB 3.14? How much better is my memcache hit rate with an extra node? Is my site slower than it was last week? Alerting Something is broken, and somebody needs to fix it right now! Or, something might break soon, so somebody should look soon.

Hightail express fails software#

Push Any change to a service’s running software or its configuration.

Hightail express fails code#

Unrelated services sharing hardware: for example, a code repository and a master for a configuration system like Puppet or Chef.

Related to each other: for example, a caching server and a web server.

There might be multiple services worth monitoring on a single machine. Node and machine Used interchangeably to indicate a single instance of a running kernel in either a physical server, virtual machine, or container. Each of these factors might stand alone as a root cause, and each should be repaired.

A given incident might have multiple root causes: for example, perhaps it was caused by a combination of insufficient process automation, software that crashed on bogus input, and insufficient testing of the script used to generate the configuration. Root cause A defect in a software or human system that, if repaired, instills confidence that this event won’t happen again in the same way. Respectively, these alerts are classified as tickets, email alerts, 22 and pages. Alert A notification intended to be read by a human and that is pushed to a system such as a bug or ticket queue, an email alias, or a pager. The dashboard might also display team information such as ticket queue length, a list of high-priority bugs, the current on-call engineer for a given area of responsibility, or recent pushes. A dashboard may have filters, selectors, and so on, but is prebuilt to expose the metrics most important to its users. Dashboard An application (usually web-based) that provides a summary view of a service’s core metrics. Black-box monitoring Testing externally visible behavior as a user would see it. White-box monitoring Monitoring based on metrics exposed by the internals of the system, including logs, interfaces like the Java Virtual Machine Profiling Interface, or an HTTP handler that emits internal statistics. Monitoring Collecting, processing, aggregating, and displaying real-time quantitative data about a system, such as query counts and types, error counts and types, processing times, and server lifetimes. Even within Google, usage of the following terms varies, but the most common interpretations are listed here. There’s no uniformly shared vocabulary for discussing all topics related to monitoring.

Hightail express fails how to#

This chapter offers guidelines for what issues should interrupt a human via a page, and how to deal with issues that aren’t serious enough to trigger a page. Google’s SRE teams have some basic principles and best practices for building successful monitoring and alerting systems.