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Comparing Server Density vs Datadog
In 2009 I wrote the original version of the Server Density monitoring agent – sd-agent – designed to be lightweight and quick and easy to deploy. It was released under the FreeBSD open source license...
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Time series data with OpenTSDB + Google Cloud Bigtable
For the last 6 years, we’ve used MongoDB as our time series datastore for graphing and metrics storage in Server Density. It has scaled well over the years and you can read about our setup here and...
View ArticleAWS Outage Teaches Us Monitor Cloud Like It’s Your Data Center
At the beginning of the month, AWS suffered a major outage of its S3 service, the original storage product which launched Amazon Web Services back in 2006. Reliance on this service was highlighted by...
View ArticleTools for managing containers
Software application deployment has always been a headache for developers. Anybody old enough to remember coding back from the days of Windows COM might remember the “DLL Hell”, a real menace for...
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Time Series Charts with React, Redux and D3
For 2 years Server Density used Backbone and Rickshaw to render server and website monitoring data into time-series charts. Rickshaw is a great library but we had to write a lot of code to bend it to...
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Building a color engine for graphing
One of the basic features of a monitoring dashboard is to display metrics that came in from the monitored infrastructure. The bread-and-butter tools for this are simple line graphs, and in line graphs,...
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Lessons learned migrating from Backbone to Redux
When we were due to implement our Alert Costs feature we decided it was time to try out Redux on something real, over the Backbone models and collections we’d been using in the past. We’d heard about,...
View ArticleHow we do HumanOps at Server Density
HumanOps came from experience of Server Density’s team being on call. In the early years, I was on call 24/7 for long periods of time. As the team grew, we implemented policies and processes to help...
View ArticleHow to do code reviews
Peer review is a well established concept in the scientific world, leading to higher quality work, improvements to techniques and an avenue for individuals to learn by examining the work of others....
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Moving to a metric centric model – Zoom, SNMP, statsd, JMX & 70 new plugins
Earlier this year, we completed a migration to a new time series database (OpenTSDB) backed by a new datastore (Google Cloud Bigtable). There were many reasons for this migration but one of the main...
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