Screaming in the Cloud

Monitoring in the entire technical world is terrible and continues to be a giant, confusing mess. How do you monitor? Are you monitoring things the wrong way? Why not hire a monitoring consultant!         
Today, we’re talking to monitoring consultant Mike Julian, who is the editor of the Monitoring Weekly newsletter and author of O’Reilly’s Practical Monitoring. He is the voice of monitoring.
Some of the highlights of the show include:

Observability comes from control theory and monitoring is for what we can anticipate
Industry’s lack of interest and focus on monitoring
When there’s an outage, why doesn’t monitoring catch it?” Unforeseen things.
Cost and failure of running tools and systems that are obtuse to monitor
Outsource monitoring instead of devoting time, energy, and personnel to it
Outsourcing infrastructure means you give up some control; how you monitor and manage systems changes when on the Cloud
CloudWatch: Where metrics go to die
Distributed and Implemented Tracing: Tracing calls as they move through a system
Serverless Functions: Difficulties experienced and techniques to use
Warm vs. Cold Start: If a container isn't up and running, it has to set up database connections
Monitoring can't fix a bad architecture; it can't fix anything; improve the application architecture
Visibility of outages and pain perceived; different services have different availability levels

Links:

Mike Julian
Monitoring Weekly
Copy Construct on Twitter
Baron Schwartz on Twitter
Charity Majors on Twitter
Redis
Kubernetes
Nagios
Datadog
New Relic
Sumo Logic
Prometheus
Honeycomb
Honeycomb Blog
CloudWatch
Zipkin
X-Ray
Lambda
DynamoDB
Pinboard
Slack
Digital Ocean

Show Notes

Monitoring in the entire technical world is terrible and continues to be a giant, confusing mess. How do you monitor? Are you monitoring things the wrong way? Why not hire a monitoring consultant!         

Today, we’re talking to monitoring consultant Mike Julian, who is the editor of the Monitoring Weekly newsletter and author of O’Reilly’s Practical Monitoring. He is the voice of monitoring.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

  • Observability comes from control theory and monitoring is for what we can anticipate
  • Industry’s lack of interest and focus on monitoring
  • When there’s an outage, why doesn’t monitoring catch it?” Unforeseen things.
  • Cost and failure of running tools and systems that are obtuse to monitor
  • Outsource monitoring instead of devoting time, energy, and personnel to it
  • Outsourcing infrastructure means you give up some control; how you monitor and manage systems changes when on the Cloud
  • CloudWatch: Where metrics go to die
  • Distributed and Implemented Tracing: Tracing calls as they move through a system
  • Serverless Functions: Difficulties experienced and techniques to use
  • Warm vs. Cold Start: If a container isn't up and running, it has to set up database connections
  • Monitoring can't fix a bad architecture; it can't fix anything; improve the application architecture
  • Visibility of outages and pain perceived; different services have different availability levels

Links:

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What is Screaming in the Cloud?

Screaming in the Cloud with Corey Quinn features conversations with domain experts in the world of Cloud Computing. Topics discussed include AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle Cloud, and the "why" behind how businesses are coming to think about the Cloud.