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Author archives: disco

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Metrics and Monitoring

Written by on July 1, 2018 in Metrics, Monitoring.

Last update on July 1, 2018.

I've had the discussion about metrics and monitoring (or metrics vs. monitoring) so many times that I turned it into a brief presentation. So now I'm turning that into a brief article here.

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Everything You Think You Know About DevOps Is Wrong, Part 2

Written by on June 21, 2018 in DevOps.

Last update on June 22, 2018.

A follow-up and clarification to address a dinner critique.

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Everything You Think You Know About DevOps Is Wrong

Written by on June 14, 2018 in DevOps.

Last update on June 15, 2018.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

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Monitorama PDX 2014 Videos

Written by on May 13, 2014 in Monitoring.

Last update on June 12, 2018.

If you missed Monitorama this year (and really, shame on you if you did), or if you just read this and were a little confused about the some of the points (Mossad? Eliminate men?), the conference videos have been posted to Vimeo.

Pay special attention to the talk by James Micken, just sayin'.


Time-series Graphs and Downsampling

Written by on May 13, 2014 in Metrics.

Last update on June 14, 2018.

In general, the usual display of time series data is a line graph - makes sense, it's the most direct visual translation of the data. The problem I keep running into is not with the graphs or the data, but expectations. In my work the biggest consumers of graphs are engineering teams and engineers love data, and they want all of it. That's a good thing, but it causes misunderstandings when they start looking at their graphs.

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Solving D3 Graph Interaction In StatusWolf

Written by on May 11, 2014 in Metrics.

Last update on June 14, 2018.

There are many things to consider when building an analytics dashboarding tool, dealing with data sources and the mountains of  information they contain, parsing that information into something understandable and presenting it to the user. Getting that last step right is the key to the whole process. In developing StatusWolf I'm constantly working to refine the graph presentation and interaction, and small changes can make big differences.

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Quick Notes From Monitorama PDX 2014

Written by on May 9, 2014 in Monitoring.

Last update on June 12, 2018.

Earlier this week I was at the Monitorama conference in Portland. This was the third Monitorama but the first that I'd attended, and if you're interested in operations and monitoring issues I can't recommend it highly enough, the signal to noise ratio was very nearly 100%. Biggest takeaway is to never miss this conference again.

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