Release It!

Operations Database

Logging and monitoring are both good for exposing and understanding the immediate behavior of an application or system. Neither is particularly good at serving the historical or future perspective. Figure 43, ​Suitability for Purpose of Transparency Technologies​, judges each of these approaches against the four perspectives. It is possible to derive a system’s current status from log files alone, but it’s very difficult, since it requires tracing backward for the last state transition for each relevant status variable. (Of course, spitting out the status variables on a recurring timer would aid this analysis.)

Monitoring systems are great at representing instantaneous behavior. They do a good job of representing ...