tl;dr click here

When we talk about capturing metrics in applications. One server/service that constantly is in all conversations monitoring, is statsd. Incase you have never heard of it, statsd is a udp/tcp server that you send your in-code metrics to. These metrics get aggregated by statsd, and are forwarded to various backends. Some backends are services like librato or sumologic. Other times you are sending metrics to time series databases such as graphite or god forbid influxdb.

This boils down to in code you can say "log whenever this block of code is hit" or say "measure how long this function takes to execute". These stories come together to form pretty graphs, and rich alerts. All of this enabled by statsd.

Around 6 months ago I started a project, and part of that project was to move us away from an old search tool to use elasticsearch.

• Day One

Day 2 was full of math based paranoia, math, and puppet(s)....

• Day Two

I am here in lovely Portland Oregon attending Monitorama. Monitorama is a 3 day open source monitoring convention.

Monitorama had catered food, and drink. The food was plentiful and delicious, and the drinks were amazing.

There were 10 talks, I have made a quick summarization below. I don't have time to write in detail about each one, but I am sure you will get the gist from the basic summary.

One of the things that I often see in our industry is the culture of access control. Security measures are put into place, because you wish to restrict access to a certain thing. Systems like HRIS need such restrictions, as private information should not be publicly available to the company. However often systems that don't need security controls put into place end up having them.

Most people understand where they fall in the business, and the authority delegated to them.

Introduction (who am I?)

Hello, Tommy here. I work at vistaprint. I spend most of my time monitoring a website, writing internal tools, and doing things some would consider "Devops".

I'm not very qualified as a blogger, quite frankly my English skills are terrible.

My perspective is not very unique at this point. The industry is full of developer/sysadmin employees, and devops has become an industry movement. This movement has created in my opinion a 'trendy effect' to what some would consider little more than a buzz word.