Observability – the good, the bad, and the ugly
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This document discusses observability and incident management. It notes that incidents are expensive and reduce credibility. Common causes of outages include changes, network failures, bugs, human errors, hardware failures, and unspecified issues. The timeline of an outage includes detection, investigation, escalation, and fixing. Many companies have a "zoo" of monitoring solutions that are difficult to manage. Common anti-patterns include an exponential growth of metrics that nobody understands. The document advocates focusing on key performance indicator metrics and using time-series databases, distributed tracing, and machine learning to more quickly detect anomalies and reduce incident timelines. It describes an open source project called Timetrix that combines metrics, events and traces for improved observability.
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Observability – the good, the bad, and the ugly
- 1. Observability – the good, the bad, and the ugly Aleksandr Tavgen
- 2. vAbout me More than 19 years of professional experience FinTech and Data Science background From Developer to SRE Engineer Solved and automated some problems in Operations on scale
- 3. What are Incidents • Something that has impact on operational/business level • Incidents are expensive • Incidents come with credibility costs
- 4. COST OF AN HOUR OF DOWNTIME 2017-2018 https://www.statista.com/statistics/753938/worldwide-enterprise-server-hourly-downtime-cost/
- 5. • Change • Network Failure • Bug • Human Factor • Unspecified • Hardware Failure Causes of outage
- 7. What is it all about? • Any reduction of outage/incident timeline results in significant positive financial impact • It is about credibility as well • And your DevOps teams feel less pain and toil on their way
- 8. Overall problem • Zoo of monitoring solutions in large enterprises often distributed over the world • M&A transactions or distributed teams make central managing impossible or ineffective • For small enterprises or startups the key question is about finding the best solution • A lot of companies have failed this way • A lot of anti-patterns have developed
- 9. Managing a Zoo • A lot of independent teams • Everyone has some sort of solution • It is hard to get overall picture of operations • It is hard to orchestrate and make changes
- 10. QUITE OFTEN A ZOO LOOKS LIKE THIS
- 11. Common Anti-patterns It is tempting to keep everything recorded just in case Amount of metrics in monitoring grows exponentially Nobody understands such huge bunch of metrics Engineering complexity grows as well
- 12. Uber case – 9 billion of metrics / 1000 + instances for monitoring
- 13. IF YOU NEED 9 BILLION OF METRICS, YOU ARE PROBABLY WRONG
- 14. Dashboards problem • Proliferating amount of metrics leads to unusable dashboards • How can one observe 9 billion metrics? • Quite often it looks like spaghetti • It is ok to pursue anti-pattern for approx. 1,5 years • GitLab Dashboards are a good example
- 19. Actually not • Dashboards are very useful when you know where and when to watch • Our brain can recognize and process visual patterns more effectively • But only when you know what you are looking for and when
- 20. Queries vs. Dashboards Querying your data requires more cognitive effort than a quick look at dashboards Metrics are a low resolution of your system’s dynamics Metrics should not replace logs It is not necessary to have millions of them
- 21. Focus on KPI metrics
- 22. Metrics • It is almost impossible to operate on billions of metrics • In case of normal system behavior there will always be outliers in real production data • Therefore, not all outliers should be flagged as anomalous incidents • Etsy Kale project case
- 24. Paradigm Shift • The main paradigm shift comes from the fields of infrastructure and architecture • Cloud architectures, microservices, Kubernetes, and immutable infrastructure have changed the way companies build and operate systems • Virtualization, containerization and orchestration frameworks abstract infra level • Moving towards abstraction from the underlying hardware and networking means that we must focus on ensuring that our applications work as intended in the context of our business processes.
- 25. KPI monitoring • KPI metrics are related to the core business operations • It could be logins, active sessions, any domain specific operations • Heavily seasoned • Static thresholds can’t help here
- 26. Our Solution • Narrowing down the amount of metrics required to defined KPI metrics • We combined push/pull model • Local push • Central pull • And we created a ML-based system, which learns your metrics’ behavior
- 27. Predictive Alerting System Anomalies combined with rules Based on dynamic rules
- 28. Overwhelming results • Red area – Customer Detection • Blue area – Own Observation (toil) • Orange line – Central Grafana Introduced • Green line – ML based solution in prod Customer Detection has dropped to low percentage points
- 29. General view • Finding anomalies on metrics • Finding regularities on a higher level • Combining events from organization internals (changes/deployments) • Stream processing architectures
- 30. Storage • We need to combine different signals • One consistent storage gives benefits • Time-series database is oriented on that requirements
- 31. Why do we need time-series storage? • We have unpredicted delay on networking • Operating worldwide is a problem • CAP theorem • You can receive signals from the past • But you should look into the future too • How long should this window be in the future?
- 32. Why not Kafka and all those classical streaming? • Frameworks like Storm, Flink - oriented on tuples not time-ordered events • We do not want to process everything • A lot of events are needed on-demand • It is ok to lose some signals in favor of performance • And we still have signals from the past
- 33. Why Influx v 2.0 • Flux • Better isolation • Central storage for metrics, events, traces • Same streaming paradigm • There is no mismatch between metaquering and quering
- 34. Taking a higher picture • Finding anomalies on a lower level • Tracing • Event logs • Finding regularities between them • Building a topology • We can call it AIOps as well
- 35. Open Tracing • Tracing is a higher resolution of your system’s dynamics • Distributed tracing can show you unknown- unknowns • It reduces Investigation part of Incident Timeline • There is a good OSS Jaeger implementation • Influx v 2.0 – the supported backend storage
- 36. Jaeger with Influxv2.0 as a Backend storage • Real prod case • Every minute approx. 8000 traces • Performance issue with limitation on I/O ops connections • Bursts of context switches on the kernel level
- 37. Impact on the particular execution flow • Db query is quite constant • Processing time in normal case - 1-3 ms • After a process context switch - more than 40 ms
- 38. Flux • Multi-source joining • Same functional composition paradigm • Easy to test hypothesis • You can combine metrics, event logs, and traces • Data transformation based on conditions
- 39. Real incident We need some statistical models to operate on raw data
- 40. Let’s check logins part
- 41. • Let’s check relations between them • Looks more like stationary time – series • Easier to model • Let’s check relations between them • Looks more like stationary time – series • Easier to model
- 42. Random Walk • Processes have a lot of random factors • Random Walk modelling • X(t) = X(t-1) + Er(t) • Er(t) = X(t) - X(t-1) • Stationary time-series is very easy to model • Do not need statistical models • Just reservoir with variance
- 43. Er(t) = X(t) - X(t-1) Er(t) = discrete derivative of (X)
- 44. On a larger scale • Simple to model • Cheap memory reservoirs models • Very fast
- 45. Security case • Failed logins ratio is related to overall statistical activity • People make type-o’s • Simple thresholds not working
- 46. One Flux transformation pipeline
- 47. Real Alerts related to attacks on Login Service
- 48. Combing all together Adding Traces and Events can reduce Investigation part Can pinpoint to Root Cause
- 49. •It is all about semantics •Datacenters, sites, services •Graph topology based on time-series data
- 50. Timetrix • As a lot people involved in it from different companies • We decided to Open Source core engine • Integrations which are specific to domain companies could be easily added • We plan to launch Q3/Q4 2019 • Core engine is written in Java • Great Kudos to bonitoo.io team for great drivers
- 51. @ATavgen - Twitter www.timetrix.io
Editor's Notes
- Virtualization, containerization, and orchestration frameworks are responsible for providing computational resources and handling failures creates an abstraction layer for hardware and networking. Moving towards abstraction from the underlying hardware and networking means that we must focus on ensuring that our applications work as intended in the context of our business processes.