Book Image

Real-World SRE

By : Nat Welch
Book Image

Real-World SRE

By: Nat Welch

Overview of this book

Real-World SRE is the go-to survival guide for the software developer in the middle of catastrophic website failure. Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) has emerged on the frontline as businesses strive to maximize uptime. This book is a step-by-step framework to follow when your website is down and the countdown is on to fix it. Nat Welch has battle-hardened experience in reliability engineering at some of the biggest outage-sensitive companies on the internet. Arm yourself with his tried-and-tested methods for monitoring modern web services, setting up alerts, and evaluating your incident response. Real-World SRE goes beyond just reacting to disaster—uncover the tools and strategies needed to safely test and release software, plan for long-term growth, and foresee future bottlenecks. Real-World SRE gives you the capability to set up your own robust plan of action to see you through a company-wide website crisis. The final chapter of Real-World SRE is dedicated to acing SRE interviews, either in getting a first job or a valued promotion.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
12
Index

Displaying monitoring information


Now that you are collecting your data and writing it into storage, you can start to display it to users. Many of the previously mentioned monitoring tools provide their own visualization systems. Others recommend that you bring your own. One popular open-source tool for this is Grafana.

Whatever you use to visualize and access your metrics, there are four categories of tools that people often use to get and share their data:

  • Arbitrary queries

  • Graphs

  • Dashboards

  • Chatbots

Let us talk about why each is useful and things to keep in mind for each of these features.

Arbitrary queries

Everyone needs the ability to create a query of the metrics and logs you are building. The reason is pretty straightforward—metrics are useless if people cannot access them. While you can build people graphs and dashboards, while people are working, they will often have new and exciting questions, which they will need to write new queries against the metric datastore to get answers to. You...