Metrics-driven Engineering at Etsy

Sixty-five engineers at Etsy deploy code to our production servers more than 30 times a day. We keep this process safe with a suite of unit tests, integration tests, and a large number of application-centric dashboards written by engineers. We capture metrics in Ganglia, Cacti, and Graphite and these metrics from technical aspects like outgoing bandwidth and web server requests per second to business aspects like new registrations and gross sales.

I plan to present an overview of the tools we use for collecting metrics and the code we use to quickly build one-page dashboards for different aspects of our site (e.g. general health, image storage, search infrastructure). The underlying theme is that these tools are not difficult to use, but typically lie in the “operations” domain. At Etsy, we’ve gone to great strides to get engineers excited about contributing to metrics and dashboards, and make it dead simple to do these things quickly so that it doesn’t impact their ability to meet deadlines.

Between now and the summer, we’ll be releasing some of the tools we are using for metrics collection and dashboard building on GitHub. I will be going into some technical detail (read: real code!) on how we integrate these tools.