The Blog. From Circonus
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...
Crash-Dump Necromancy
Recently, one of our on-premises customers experienced a system crash with one of their metric-storage nodes. Circonus offers the option to operate a complete, private copy of our product on a customer’s own premises. This may be because of a compliance requirement or...
How We Keep Your Data Safe
Some of our users tell us that moving to Circonus from in-house operated tools was driven by the desire to outsource responsibility for availability and data safety to someone else. This might sound odd, but building highly resilient systems is hard, most engineering...
Time, but Faster
Every once in awhile, you find yourself in a rabbit hole, unsure of where you are or what time it might be. In this post, I'll show you a computing adventure about time through the looking glass. The first premise you must understand was summed up perfectly by the...
Rapid Resolution With The Right Tools
Here at Circonus, we obviously monitor our infrastructure with the Circonus platform. However, there are many types of monitoring, and our product isn’t intended to cover all the bases. While Circonus leads to profound insights into the behavior of systems, it isn’t a...
LuaJIT and the Illumos VM
I’m about to dive into some esoteric stuff, so be warned. We use LuaJIT extensively throughout most of our product suite here at Circonus. It is core supported technology in the libmtev platform on which we build most of our high-performance server apps. Lua (and...
The Uphill Battle for Visibility
In 2011, Circonus released a feature that revolutionized the way people could observe systems. We throw around the word “histogram” a lot and the industry has listened. And while we’ve made great progress, it seems that somewhere along the way the industry got lost....