Simon Willison’s Weblog

The Four Golden Signals. “The four golden signals of monitoring are latency, traffic, errors, and saturation. If you can only measure four metrics of your user-facing system, focus on these four.”—from the excellent (and free) Google Site Reliability Engineering book.

# 22nd June 2018, 9:23 pm / monitoring

The Virtues of Monitoring. Fantastic guide to the various levels of monitoring required for a modern web application.

# 13th January 2011, 4:26 am / monitoring, operations, sysadmin, recovered

Tracking Every Release. How Etsy use Graphite to monitor their continuous deployment releases.

# 10th December 2010, 10:04 am / continuous-deployment, devops, etsy, monitoring, recovered

Announcing Kong: A server description and deployment testing tool. An ultra simple website monitoring tool written in Django which makes it easy to manage a list of Twill scripts for testing different sites. It was developed at the Lawrence Journal-World—Eric showed me a demo if this a year or so ago and I’ve been hoping they would open source it.

# 18th November 2009, 12:47 pm / open-source, django, monitoring, ops, eric-holscher, kong

memcache-top. Useful self-contained perl script for interactively monitoring a group of memcached servers.

# 29th October 2009, 8:32 am / perl, memcached, monitoring

Graphite. Real-time graphing package for server monitoring, similar to RRDTool. Created by the team at Orbitz, using Django and ExtJS for the frontend and Cairo to generate the graphs.

# 28th June 2008, 11:53 pm / graphite, cairo, orbitz, rrdtool, monitoring, graphing, django, python, extjs

god—process and task monitoring done right. I have a long running animosity towards every process monitoring tool currently in existence; I’ll have to put this one through its paces and see if it sucks less.

# 29th March 2008, 10:20 pm / processes, monitoring, ruby, god, sysadmin

Wikimedia Grid Report. Wikipedia’s Ganglia monitoring page.

# 11th May 2007, 11:36 am / wikipedia, monitoring, gaonglia, wikimedia