Latest SRE & DevOps Articles

The best of Velocity and DevOpsDays 2013 (part I)

This article summarizes key takeaways from the Velocity and DevOpsDays conferences. It highlights discussions around managing risk in system design – emphasizing open communication…

Quantifying Abnormal Behavior

06/25/13 At Velocity last week, I spoke about how we quantify abnormality in a system’s time-series metrics cheaply, in realtime, at high frequency. Note that this is not the same …

3 reasons why your HAProxy monitoring is broken

This article details how to effectively monitor HAProxy using Datadog, a monitoring and analytics platform. It explains how to leverage Datadog's auto-discovery feature to automati…

ScreenBoards: Your data, your way, in seconds

The Datadog Terraform provider v4.0.0 introduces significant improvements including support for new resources like serverless functions and enhanced monitoring capabilities for clo…

May NYC DevOps Meetup @ Datadog HQ [VIDEOS]

This article summarizes the talks given at the DevOps NYC Meetup, featuring insights from eight speakers on topics ranging from DevOps tips and Chef versioning to Cassandra exports…

Replacing Clever Code with Unremarkable Code in Go

06/04/13 Not too long ago, my primary programming language was Perl. I’ve written a lot of Perl, including some things that I think are quite clever. And therein lies the problem. …

Decrypt Devops alerts with contextual graphs, runbooks and routing

Datadog's Terraform provider v4.0.0 is now available, bringing significant improvements including support for new resources like Network Policy and Rate Limit rules, and enhanced f…

How Does Adaptive Fault Detection Work? Does It Eliminate Thresholds?

04/17/13 In previous posts, I claimed that thresholds are a root of much evil in monitoring systems (not the root of all evil, but a root of much evil), and that we’ve developed th…

Using Socat to Simulate Networking Traffic to Test and Debug

04/15/13 If you don’t know socat, you probably should. From its man: Socat is a command line based utility that establishes two bidirectional byte streams and transfers data betwee…

Two Reasons Why Threshold-Based Monitoring Is Hopelessly Broken

04/10/13 Why is a threshold-based alert such a disaster? There are two big reasons. Thresholds are always wrong. They’re worse than a broken clock, which is at least right twice a …

A Sure-Fire Recipe For Monitoring Disaster

04/09/13 In this post I’ll tell a story that will feel familiar to anyone who’s ever monitored MySQL. Here’s a recipe for a threshold-based alert that will go horribly wrong, beyon…

Why You Should Almost Never Alert On Thresholds

04/08/13 This post is part of an ongoing series on the best practices for effective and insightful database monitoring. Much of what’s covered in these posts is unintuitive, yet vi…