Skip to Content
Web Operations
book

Web Operations

by John Allspaw, Jesse Robbins
June 2010
Intermediate to advanced
338 pages
10h 33m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Web Operations

Chapter 6. Monitoring

Patrick Debois

Story: "The Start of a Journey"

As a sys admin, I became fascinated by the powers of the Internet, and with it the power of the Web. Very soon, I started running my own website on one of the university computers. It was a platform for sharing links. I devoured every single computer book and magazine, went to all the user groups and conferences I could, and constantly surfed the Web for tips on how to structure my website. The site became popular, and some students started to rely on it for their daily work.

After running the site for some time, there was a major power outage on campus, and the web server didn't come back up. I got flooded with emails from students asking me to fix the problem. I quickly restarted the server and went back to tuning it and adding content. This was the first downtime the website experienced.

One morning, the website was down again and I found my mailbox full of emails. Dutifully, I restarted the server, but a few hours later the website was down again. I knew The Problem wasn't due to a power outage, as everything else was still online. And it wasn't due to the network, as my pings were showing no problems.

To automate the check to see if the website was down, I wrote a little script that did a simple HTTP request, and if the website didn't respond, it would send me an email. I was no longer relying on users to detect the problem. Most of the time I would be notified and was able to restart the website before any users ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

Back-end Performance

Back-end Performance

Bruno Skvorc, Christopher Pitt, Tonino Jankov, Reza Lavaryan, Daniel Berman
What Successful Project Managers Do

What Successful Project Managers Do

W. Scott Cameron, Jeffrey S. Russell, Edward J. Hoffman, Alexander Laufer

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781449377465Errata Page