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

Collecting and saving monitoring data


Once you have instrumented your application, you will need to store your data somewhere. As I mentioned in the Instrumenting an application section of this chapter, there are many possible tools you can use. I will be talking about some of the tools, but be aware that there are many others. Talk to your friends, do research online, and try different tools to figure out what is best for you, your team, and your organization.

I tend to organize monitoring tools into two buckets. This is often a simplification of these systems, but it helps me to think about how they work. These two buckets are polling applications and push applications.

Polling applications

Polling (also known as pull) applications scrape data from a service and then store and display the data. Some of the complaints against polling applications are that you need to keep some record of all of your services to scrape. There's nothing wrong with polling applications, but this is just something...