Monitoring Complex Systems

Brian will provide motivation for the extensive instrumentation of complex computer systems and make the argument that such systems are more technically excellent than their un-instrumented equivalents. This talk will build off his Erlang Factory and Write the Docs talk on similar subjects, providing practical starting points in Erlang projects and maintaining a perspective on the human organization around the computer system. He will focus particularly on avoiding “instrumentation blindness”, the challenge of interpreting and acting on metrics emitted from a production system in a way which does not overwhelm operators’ ability to effectively control or prioritize faults in the system. He’ll use historical examples and case studies from my own work to advance this argument.

Slides
Video

About Brian

Brian is a seven-year Erlang hacker, having gotten into it at University and his interests run to the large-scale distributed side of things. He's worked with Erlang professionally for four years, currently at AdRoll where he's a developer on the RTB (real-time bidding) team and previously at Rackspace, where he was a developer on the FireEngine project (previously discussed at Erlang Factory 2012).

Twitter: @bltroutwine

GitHub: blt 

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