Book Image

Mastering Elixir

By : André Albuquerque, Daniel Caixinha
Book Image

Mastering Elixir

By: André Albuquerque, Daniel Caixinha

Overview of this book

Running concurrent, fault-tolerant applications that scale is a very demanding responsibility. After learning the abstractions that Elixir gives us, developers are able to build such applications with inconceivable low effort. There is a big gap between playing around with Elixir and running it in production, serving live requests. This book will help you fll this gap by going into detail on several aspects of how Elixir works and showing concrete examples of how to apply the concepts learned to a fully ?edged application. In this book, you will learn how to build a rock-solid application, beginning by using Mix to create a new project. Then you will learn how the use of Erlang's OTP, along with the Elixir abstractions that run on top of it (such as GenServer and GenStage), that allow you to build applications that are easy to parallelize and distribute. You will also master supervisors (and supervision trees), and comprehend how they are the basis for building fault-tolerant applications. Then you will use Phoenix to create a web interface for your application. Upon fnishing implementation, you will learn how to take your application to the cloud, using Kubernetes to automatically deploy, scale, and manage it. Last, but not least, you will keep your peace of mind by learning how to thoroughly test and then monitor your application.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
5
Demand-Driven Processing
Index

Collecting metrics


Prometheus is an open source monitoring tool that works in a pull fashion: instead of each individual application sending its collected metrics to the server, each application exposes an endpoint and the Prometheus server constantly scrapes the available metrics. It is also able to dynamically discover metric sources to scrape, and it comes with support out of the box for different sources, such as AWS EC2, Azure VM, and Google Container Engine instances.

On top of this, Prometheus provides a powerful query language and is also able to send alerts based on the collected data. These are the types of metrics Prometheus is able to collect:

  • Counter: This allows you to count whenever something happens. By definition, counters can only increase.
  • Gauge: This lets you track quantities that vary over time, such as CPU time or number of Elixir processes running in the BEAM. Each data point captures the value of the gauge metric at a specific moment in time.
  • Histogram: This lets you...