I continue to be intrigued by the evolution of software architectures and their impact on business. In my 20+ year career, I’ve participated in four of these architecture transitions – the shift from client-server to the internet, the rise of 3-tier architectures underpinning rich internet applications, virtualization that upended the dominance of hardware providers, and now the shift to microservices-based architectures based on cloud infrastructure and software automation.
If you’re building a new application from scratch and are responsible for maintaining its availability and performance, you might wonder whether you should be monitoring logs or metrics. For us, it’s a no-brainer that you’ll want both: metrics are fast and efficient for proactively monitoring the health of your system, while logs are essential for helping to troubleshoot the details of the issue itself to find the root cause.
Graphite Metrics are one of the most common metrics formats in application monitoring today. Originally designed in 2006 by Chris Davis at Orbitz and open-sourced in 2008, Graphite itself is a monitoring tool now used by many organizations both large and small.
“Why does the ‘docker logs’ command fail?“, is one of our frequently asked questions. The answer is simple and mentioned in the Docker documentation: “The docker logs command is not available for drivers other than json-file and journald.”
If you’re part of a large enterprise, you’re probably in the throes of digital transformation. If you’re in IT, you’re supporting your business by rolling out new services and apps weekly (or even daily). Meanwhile, your users expect 24×7 availability and performance. So your IT operations team is having to sift through ever-increasing data pouring out of myriad specialized and fragmented monitoring tools, hybrid clouds, legacy systems and virtual infrastructure.
