Keeping Production Sane: Let's talk about Monitoring and Streaming

There are dozens of tools on the market that focus on monitoring: making sure that you and your teams receive appropriate notification when human intervention in an environment is necessary. Unfortunately for a lot of teams this can mean creating an extraordinary amount of noise while just trying to keep tabs on their environments. In our first talk, we'll be discussing ways to avoid this trap while planning notifications. In our second, we'll be discussing how we use Kafka in our production systems and lessons learned for how to configure and monitor this service.

First talk: Sensory Friendly Monitoring by Quintessence Anx

Integrations have been key in helping teams signal each other about all kinds of valuable information: when code is ready for review, when features are ready for release, when resources are running low or there is an outage, or even when the team is getting ready to go to a team lunch. All this information can lead to overload and engineering teams may find that they are frequently filtering or muting individual alerts, channels, or perhaps even alert sources so they can focus enough to complete other tasks. Unfortunately this can lead to missing critical events with potentially costly consequences. She'll discuss sources of noise, silence, information direction, and cleaning up irrelevant monitors / metrics.

About Quintessence:
Quintessence (Q, Quinn) Anx has worked in the Buffalo IT community for over 10 years, including as a database administrator and a DevOps / Cloud / Infrastructure engineer. She was a core contributor to Stark & Wayne's SHIELD project, which adds backup functionality to Cloud Foundry, as well as a technical reviewer for Learning Go Programming published by Packt Publishing. Currently she is the US Developer Advocate for Logz.io, focusing community engagement related to DevOps. Outside of work she is a chapter leader of Girl Develop It Buffalo and helps women in the Buffalo community launch careers in software development.

Second talk: Apache Kafka in Logzio Production by Emanuel Peri

Apache Kafka is an open-source stream-processing software platform. Due to its widespread integration into enterprise-level infrastructures, monitoring Kafka performance at scale has become an increasingly important issue. We utilize Apache Kafka as part of our core product, and would like to share some of our insights about monitoring its state and performance with a collection of open-source tools.

About Emanuel:
Emanuel (Noni) Peri is part of the Engineering team at Logz.io, having led the DevOps team for three years and has recently relocated from Tel-Aviv to Boston. For over 17 years he has worked in the security and mobile telecommunications industries in a variety of technical and customer oriented positions. He has headed the Professional Services and Customer Support teams at AxisMobile, built the Customer Support the Deployment teams at InfoGin, and served as VP Professional Services at CallmyName as well as Production Manager at Sentrix Information Security.

Agenda:
5:30PM - Arrivals
5:45PM - Welcome and Introduction
6:00PM - Sensory Friendly Monitoring
6:30PM - Apache Kafka in Logzio Production
7:00PM - Q&A Session/Networking

*Food and Drinks will be provided