Monitorama PDX & my metrics 2.0 presentation

Earlier this month we had another iteration of the Monitorama conference, this time in Portland, Oregon.


(photo by obfuscurity)

I think the conference was better than the first one in Boston, much more to learn. Also this one was quite focused on telemetry (timeseries metrics processing), lots of talks on timeseries analytics, not so much about things like sensu or nagios. Adrian Cockroft's keynote brought some interesting ideas to the table, like building a feedback loop into the telemetry to drive infrastructure changes (something we do at Vimeo, I briefly give an example in the intro of my talk) or shortening the time from fault to alert (which I'm excited to start working on soon)
My other favorite was Noah Kantrowitz's talk about applying audio DSP techniques to timeseries, I always loved audio processing and production. Combining these two interests hadn't occurred to me so now I'm very excited about the applications.
The opposite, but just as interesting of an idea - conveying information about system state as an audio stream - came up in puppetlab's monitorama recap and that seems to make a lot of sense as well. There's a lot of information in a stream of sound, it is much denser than text, icons and perhaps even graph plots. Listening to an audio stream that's crafted to represent various information might be a better way to get insights into your system.


I'm happy to see the idea reinforced that telemetry is a key part of modern monitoring. For me personally, telemetry (the tech and the process) is the most fascinating part of modern technical operations, and I'm glad to be part of the movement pushing this forward. There's also a bunch of startups in the space (many stealthy ones), validating the market. I'm curious to see how this will play out.


I had the privilege to present metrics 2.0 and Graph-Explorer. As usual the slides are on slideshare and the footage on the better video sharing platform ;-) .
I'm happy with all the positive feedback, although I'm not aware yet of other tools and applications adopting metrics 2.0, and I'm looking forward to see some more of that, because ultimately that's what will show if my ideas are any good.

Add comment