Practical Monitoring

Appendix A. An Example Runbook: Demo App

This is an example runbook (mentioned in Chapter 3) for you to use in your own environment. This is a great starting point, and I encourage you to build on this and iterate over time. A runbook is only as good as the information in it, so if you find you need different sections, by all means, create them!

Demo App

The Rails Demo App is a simple Rails blog app, showing off how a basic Rails app might look. The main components are a database-backed user management system and a post/comment system.

Metadata

The codebase is located in the internal source code system under the name demo-app.

The service owner is John Doe.

Escalation Procedure

In the event assistance is needed to resolve an issue with this service, the service owner has requested to be the next escalation point. See the company contact sheet for contact instructions.

External Dependencies

No external dependencies

Internal Dependencies

PostgreSQL database, running on an RDS instance located at rds-123.foo.com.

Tech Stack

• Rails 4.x

• PostgreSQL (AWS RDS)

Metrics and Logs

The app emits the following metrics:

• User login (count)

• User logout (count)

• Post create (count)

• Post delete (count)

• Comment create (count)

• Comment delete (count)

• Post create time (timer)

• Post delete time (timer)

• User signup time (timer)

• User login time (timer)

• User logout time (timer)

The app emits the following logs:

• User signin with user ID, status (success/fail), and ...