Monitoring and metrics – Yes, of course.

I always try to convince everybody to measure. The first reaction are very different, but after a while everyone come back and says “Wow! I didn’t realize how helpful metrics can be”.

I’ve watched video: “Using Monitoring and Metrics to Learn in Development”  (by Patrick Debois from Atlassian) with pleasure. I use Atlassian tools and talk with few guys. They really care about code of their products. Patrick not only talks about metrics but also talks about technics and ideas which helps deliver better software.

Ideas from presentation:

• smaller and frequent changes – easier to repair (dev for ops)
• faster and better feedback – easier to find problem (ops for dev)
• continuous integration maturity model – see slideshare presentation.
• reuse “workflows” across environments by using virtualization – vagrant (great tool for building dev environments), puppet/chef (configuration automation and management)
• infrastructure code repository and application code repository have to be in sync.
• always remember that: “a lot of different monitoring levels we have” :).
• monitoring driven development 🙂 – create a monitor check before implementing a feature (it is useless but you can think about similarities
• monitoring tools grumble (around 00:19:20) – there is a projects by “Monitoring Sucks” (github), you can check but only one seems to be alive.
• use monitoring as a service – this sound reasonable (pingdom, NewRelict, boundary, librato, and some others).
• and  lot of other tools are mentioned – if you want to evaluate tools for metrics and monitoring you should watch video and note potential tools for evaluation.
• always know the context of the metrics.
• final thought: Metrics Driven Engineering (Etsy on the stage) – IMHO this is great idea to follow.

Whatever we will doing, it will happen our code do not work, our code stinks and become worser, but every time we figure out, we can do something with it. This is the reason it is so important to monitor our application continuously.

Patrick also mention about developer and operation responsibility sharing, he wrote a nice blog post: Just Enough Developed Infrastructure. I recommend you to read it too.