The Blog. From Circonus
Monitoring Queue Sizes
At Circonus we are collecting a number of metric about block devices. An interesting one is the average length of the request queue, which is exposed by iostat[1]: aqu-sz The average queue length of the requests that were issued to the device. Note: In previous...
Hosts, Metrics, and Pricing, Oh My!
As the number and types of monitoring vendors have risen over the past several years, so have the pricing models. With the rise of cloud based ephemeral systems, often running alongside statically provisioned infrastructure, understanding the monitoring needs of one’s...
Monitoring as Code
Circonus has always been API-driven, and this has always been one of our product’s core strengths. Via our API, Circonus provides the ability to create anything that you can in the UI and more. With so many of our customers moving to API-driven platforms like AWS,...
Postmortem: 2017-04-11 Firewall Outage
The Event At approximately 05:40AM GMT on 4/11/2017, we experienced a network outage in our main datacenter in Chicago, IL. The outage lasted until approximately 10:55AM GMT on the same day. The Circonus SaaS service, as well as any PUSH based checks that use the...
Documenting with Types
I've said this before: elegant code is pedagogical. That is, elegant code is designed to teach its readers about the concepts and relationships in the problem domain that the code addresses, with as little noise as possible. I think data types are a fundamental tool...
Post-Mortem 2017.1.12.1
TL;DR: Some users received spurious false alerts for approximately 30 minutes, starting at 2017-01-12 22:10 UTC. It is our assessment that no expected alerts were missed. There was no data loss. Overview Due to a software bug in the ingestion pipeline specific to...
Introducing IRONdb
Software is eating the world. Devices that run that software are ubiquitous and multiplying rapidly. Without adequate monitoring on these services, operators are mostly flying blind, either relying on customers to report issues or manually jumping on boxes and spot...
Systems Monitoring is Ripe for a Revolution
Before we explore systems, let’s talk users. After all, most of our businesses wouldn’t exist without lots of users; users that have decreasing brand loyalty and who value unintrusive, convenient, and quick experiences. We’ve intuited that if a user has a better...
COSI:Postgres
A few months ago we announced the availability Circonus One Step Install (COSI) to introduce a very fast way to get data collected for systems with the most obvious set of metrics enabled. This makes monitoring new systems as easy as copying and pasting a command into...