DevOps Articles

The Magic of Metrics and How It Can Burn You

To keep our software running, we need to notice whether it’s working in production.

We can do this by making the software tell us what we need to know.

Its magic is that we can take any number of instances, combine them in any order and get a single instance that accumulates all the information with negligible increase in size.

If we store events instead of metrics, we can add them arbitrarily, and we can divide them arbitrarily too.

With modern disk and network capacities, we can afford to emit events full of attributes about everything that might matter to our application.