Book Image

Real-World SRE

By : Pavlos Ratis, Nat Welch
Book Image

Real-World SRE

By: Pavlos Ratis, 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 (16 chapters)
Real-World SRE
Contributors
Preface
Other Books You May Enjoy
Index

Chapter 2. Monitoring

Monitoring is defined by Oxford Dictionaries (https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/monitor) as to "observe and check the progress or quality of (something) over a period; keep under systematic review." This definition points out two crucial details—firstly, you need to define what quality is and make sure that your system is making progress toward, or staying within, a limit of quality. Secondly, you need to be systematic about this work—you should not be randomly looking at your system. Instead, your approach should be consistent. The need for systematic measurements is one reason that your dentist asks you to come in every six months, or a reason why some insurance companies ask you to get a dedicated primary care doctor.

In this chapter, we will be focusing on the tools and methodology of monitoring modern web services. The chapter will include thoughts on what data to collect, how to collect that data, how to store that data, and how to display that data...