social improvements in monitoring

MonitoringSocial Improvements in How We Monitor

Thursday, October 13, 11

Author

Speaker

Entrepreneur:

OmniTI

Message Systems

Circonus

Fontdeck

Theo Schlossnagle @postwait

Thursday, October 13, 11

Thursday, October 13, 11

NASA is awesome

Q: So, why can’t we do it just as well?

A: Organizational purpose and culture.

Thursday, October 13, 11

Organizations are Fractured

Technical ops is abstracted from business ops.

As a result,business ops is abstracted from technical ops.

Start-ups don’t have this issue.

Thursday, October 13, 11

StartupsAre transparent.Are small enough to be transparent.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jm3/440093314/sizes/o/in/photostream/

Thursday, October 13, 11

Organizations are Agile

The “mission” of a technical operations group

changes from day to day (or week to week)

not only logistically,

but also strategically

Adaptive tactics are hard to understand and control.

Thursday, October 13, 11

Who cares?

This is probably the best question of all.

Thursday, October 13, 11

We the Agile

Fear process that we don’t own.

Fear integrating into the processes of others.

Look down on those that are not Agile.

Hey asshole: your ruining your business.

Thursday, October 13, 11

Bad words.Six Sigma

ITILv3

Thursday, October 13, 11

Bad words?

Yes.

Thursday, October 13, 11

Bad ideas?Six Sigma

Continuous efforts to achieve stable and predictable process results (i.e., reduce process variation) are of vital importance to business success.

Manufacturing and business processes have characteristics that can be measured, analyzed, improved and controlled.

Achieving sustained quality improvement requires commitment from the entire organization, particularly from top-level management

ITILv3a set of best-practices for IT service management (ITSM) that focuses on aligning IT services with the needs of the business.

Thursday, October 13, 11

Bad ideas?

Obviously not.

Thursday, October 13, 11

Monitoring taught us...

Process is something that connects business with IT.

It’s a love fest.

Thursday, October 13, 11

Why it is so good.

Technologists rock.

We can answer questions of extreme magnitude.

Faster than ever before.

We’re fucking superheroes.

We’re also shitty at asking good questions.

Thursday, October 13, 11

Why else is it good?

Understanding your business and its direction is hard.

Suits happen to be full of both awesome questions

and lots and lots of data.

They also tend to make good sense of technical data.

Thursday, October 13, 11

What Operations Watches

Thursday, October 13, 11

Change vs. Success

Thursday, October 13, 11

How your users feel.

Thursday, October 13, 11

But wait!

you are most likely lying to yourself.

Thursday, October 13, 11

Numbers: how they work.Think of a car’s speedometer.

it shows you how fast you are going (sorta)

at the moment you read it (almost)

the only reason this is acceptable is:

you have a rudimentary understanding of physics,

you are in the car, and

your body is exceptionally goodat detecting acceleration.

Thursday, October 13, 11

Computers are different.

computers are fast: billions of instructions per second.

you aren’t inside the computer.

most “users” somehow forget rudimentary physics.

interfaces and visual representations mislead you.

a speedometer (or familiar readout) leads you toa false confidence in system stability between samples.

Thursday, October 13, 11

Write IOPSSimple, relatively stable, easy to trend...and wrong.

Thursday, October 13, 11

Zooming in shows insight.It is not as smooth as we thought.Good to know.

Thursday, October 13, 11

Dishonesty Revealed.This is “inside” a 5 minute sample.Note: we’re still sampling; now at 0.5 Hz.

Thursday, October 13, 11

More lies.

Thursday, October 13, 11

More lies.

1.6383647798742138 beers per day.

Thursday, October 13, 11

More lies.

0

50

100

150

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

1.6383647798742138 beers per day.

Thursday, October 13, 11

More lies.

0

50

100

150

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

SundayMondayTuesday

WednesdayThursday

FridaySaturday

0 30 60 90 120

1.6383647798742138 beers per day.

Thursday, October 13, 11

You’ve Been Deceived.

1. Denial and Isolation

2. Anger

3. Bargaining

4. Depression

5. Acceptance

Thursday, October 13, 11

You’ve Been Deceived.

1. Denial and Isolation

2. Anger

3. Bargaining

4. Depression

5. Acceptance

let’s just skip this one, okay?

Thursday, October 13, 11

You’ve Been Deceived.

1. Denial and Isolation

2. Anger

3. Bargaining

4. Depression

5. Acceptance

let’s just skip this one, okay?

If you’re not angry, get angry:it’s the next step in healing

Thursday, October 13, 11

You’ve Been Deceived.

1. Denial and Isolation

2. Anger

3. Bargaining

4. Depression

5. Acceptance

let’s just skip this one, okay?

If you’re not angry, get angry:it’s the next step in healing

This is where it gets interesting.

Thursday, October 13, 11

Depression

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_beer_consumption_per_capita

Thursday, October 13, 11

Depression

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_beer_consumption_per_capita

Tell me how it feels to be #13?

Thursday, October 13, 11

Depression

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_beer_consumption_per_capita

Tell me how it feels to be #13? Pathetic.

Thursday, October 13, 11

Thanks and Homework.

I travel a lot...I know now that I’m very lucky to live in Maryland.

Write your local government asking for more sane alcohol distribution regulation in your state.

And, please do your part to bring our great country into the top 10 per capita beer consuming nations.

Thursday, October 13, 11