Schedule: Monitoring, Tracing and Metrics sessions

Sasha Goldshtein leads a hands-on workshop on Linux dynamic tracing. You'll explore the BPF Compiler Collection (BCC), a set of tools and libraries for dynamic tracing, and gain firsthand experience of memory leak analysis, generic function tracing, kernel tracepoints, static tracepoints in user-space programs, and the baked-in tools for file I/O, network, and CPU analysis. Read more.

Most people think about microservices as a solution for scale. That may be the case, but operating them is definitely a scale challenge. Sarah Wells explains why, when you have 100+ services, everything needs to be automated, or else you'll spend two days updating Jenkins build pipelines or be woken up every night by false alarms caused by network blips. Read more.

As the systems we build become more distributed and (in the case of containerization) ephemeral, traditional monitoring tools prove to be grossly insufficient. Fortunately, the state of monitoring has evolved to meet these new demands, but it brings its own set of technical and organizational challenges. Cindy Sridharan offers an honest overview of monitoring challenges and trade-offs. Read more.

With the recent flourishing of observability systems, there's no shortage of things to monitor. Sadly, humans have limited capacity to process them all. Mark McBride outlines three key metrics—request rate, success rate, and the latency histogram—that provide a high-level abstraction of the customer experience. If these three metrics are good, your system is healthy from a customer perspective. Read more.

Observability (or lack thereof), like testability and maintainability, is a fundamental property of systems. But what does observable code look like? What instrumentation creates systems that are observable later in arbitrary ways, in circumstances you can't foresee? Baron Schwartz outlines the most useful things to know about observability in systems in production. Read more.

Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) is the most important diagnostic tool Windows developers have at their disposal. Dina Goldshtein explores the rich and wonderful world of ETW events, which span numerous OS components. You’ll learn how to diagnose complex issues in production systems and discover ways to automate ETW collection and analysis to build self-diagnosing applications. Read more.

Sasha Goldshtein explores a holistic set of BPF-based tools for monitoring JVM applications on Linux and outlines a systems performance checklist that includes classics like fileslower, opensnoop, and strace—all based on the noninvasive, fast, and safe BPF technology. Read more.