Will Chen

I just purchased several ebooks from Prag Prog because they have a Cyber Monday discount, and I've decided to have a moratorium on purchasing new ebooks until I finish my "to read" list.

Recently finished reading:

• Leading the transformation: Applying agile and devops principle at scale
• The Halo effect
• Debugging teams
• Hooked: How to build habit-forming products
• Learning Agile

Currently reading:

• Innovator's Dilemma
• Lean Product Playbook

On break from reading:

• Crossing the Chasm 
• Service design

Currently on my reading list:

• NoSQL Distilled (read ~half)
• Designing data-intensive applications (still being written)
• How to solve it
• Reactive Programming JS
• Predicting the unpredictable
• Release it!
• Beyond legacy code
• The Go programming language
• How Linux works
• Functional programming through lambda calculus

Tapiki is a production monitoring / debugging tool for the JVM and they've written up a very detailed multi-part guide on various production tools. I really like how they separate out the tools into various categories so you can see which tools are in the same "solution space" (e.g. you probably don't need to use more than one of them, unless there's a really good reason).

http://blog.takipi.com/the-definitive-guide-for-production-tools-24-ways-to-see-through-your-application/

This is just a quick post to summarize my thoughts on logging and monitoring. I have spent a bit of time now for my particular product at OpenTable to do logging and monitoring and I've quickly realized that it's a pretty deep topics.

I've included some resources below, mostly things that I've found helpful or seem interesting:

• StatsD / Graphite - good for business metrics and any type of summary statistic (e.g. getting alerted of production issues)
• Etsy's initial blogpost on StatsD - "Measure Anything, Measure Everything"
• Configuring StatsD for Graphite - https://github.com/etsy/statsd/blob/master/docs/graphite.md
• I think it may be a good idea to have a single "bootstrap StatsD" service which essentially triggers every StatsD event when you're releasing a new metric / product / environment. Otherwise, Graphite has no knowledge of the metric, and from what I've seen, you can't add those metrics to your dashboard in advance (e.g. you know you will eventually get a 500 HTTP server error, but you can't initially select it specifically - you can only use a wildcard * to capture its group).
• Gentle introductions on the various components of Graphite and how it works with StatsD by Digital Ocean
• The "ELK" stack: Elasticsearch / Logstash / Kibana - good for capturing detailed logs (e.g. debugging production issues)
• Overall architecture diagram below
• Brief overview of ELK (first product reviewed)
• Interesting blog posts on some of the issues of operating the ELK stack in production - There's numerous ELK SaaS as a solution that I think in general these hosted solutions will become more and more affordable over time.

Source: Digital Ocean on ELK stack

Paid solutions for using StatsD:

• There is a hosted Graphite / StatsD service that seems to have an affordable entry plan ($19/mo): https://www.hostedgraphite.com/hosted-statsd
• Scout: https://scoutapp.com/signup

Paid solution for the "ELK" stack:

• elastic, the company behind the three open-source projects of the ELK stack, has a SaaS offering for Elasticsearch (which can be tricky to operate especially as you scale): https://www.elastic.co/found/features

To do list for learning:

• Official Redux guide - in-depth and well-written
• Redux by Dan Abramov on Egghead.io
• Refactoring Module Dependencies by Martin Fowler
• Concurrency in Javascript (Async, CSP, and Observables)
• Async Javascript (Observables) by Jafar Husain
• CSS3 In Depth by Estelle Weyl

Node.js has long had a reputation of being difficult to write error handling for, in large part because of it's async, evented-io model. Joyent has a very indepth article on error handling:

https://www.joyent.com/developers/node/design/errors