Practical Monitoring

Chapter 11. Conducting a Monitoring Assessment

We’ve reached the final chapter of the book, folks. You have, I hope, learned many new things. This last chapter will take you through a fictionalized example of applying all the lessons of this book at once using an exercise I do with my own consulting clients: a monitoring assessment.

Performing a monitoring assessment on your environment is a great way to systematically determine what you should be monitoring and why. The end result is a clearer understanding of the behavior of your app and underlying infrastructure. It’s by no means exhaustive or perfect, but rather, it’s intended to be a starting point to get you thinking about what matters and what doesn’t.

Business KPIs

To start off, we need to figure out exactly what Tater.ly does. After a chat with the CEO, we’ve learned the following:

Tater.ly’s mission is to help french-fry aficionados find the best french fries in all the land. Users come to Tater.ly to look up restaurants and read reviews about their french fries, as well as post their own reviews. The french fries are also rated on a scale of one to five, with five being the best. Restaurants can create their own pages or users can create them. Restaurants can “claim” their pages if the page already exists. Tater.ly makes money through advertising by placing a Featured Fry at the top of search results, with restaurants paying an advertising fee for the slot. The ad fees are based on number of impressions—that is, the ...