Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Holiday season's peak traffic is the most challenging period for SREs and on-call engineers. In this blog, we have highlighted the things that SREs can do to make the holiday season less chaotic. The recently concluded Black Friday weekend could have potentially been the most challenging shift for on-call engineers working in the Retail or E-Commerce sector. Since such peak-traffic events push the system to the limits, engineering teams are engulfed in a lot of tension preparing for it.

One more “ops” phoneme like DevOps is ChatOps; or conversation-based development/operations. ChatOps has been growing in popularity as communication platforms such as Slack is ingrained in our day-to-day engineering lives. A team lead once told me “if it didn’t happen in Slack, it didn’t happen” showing the emphasis of communication platforms as a system of record.

A common DevOps use case involves alerting when hosts stop reporting metrics, aka a deadman alert. This can be done using the monitor.deadman() Flux function. One can easily create a deadman (or threshold) check in the InfluxDB UI Alerts section or craft a custom task to alert as well. Check out InfluxDB’s Checks and Notifications system post for more details. It’s also possible to use the monitor.deadman() function directly in a dashboard cell.