Observability

Observability refers to gathering as much information as possible to enable system operators, DevOps practitioners, and Site Reliability Engineers to ask questions about that information

• What is observability - Grafana

The USE Method

The USE method applies to hardware

• Utilization - Percentage of time the resource is busy (such as CPU usage of a node)
• Saturation - Amount of work a resource has to do, often queue length of node load

• Errors - Count of error events

• The USE Method

• USE Method - Linux Performance Checklist
• Grafana Dashboard - Node Exporter / USE Method

The RED Method

The RED method applies to services, it can be represented nicely using a Prometheus histogram

• Rate - Requests per second

  sum(rate(request_duration_seconds_count{job="..."}[1m]))
  

• Errors - Number of requests that are failing

  sum(rate(request_duration_seconds_count{job="...", status_code!~"2.."}[1m]))
  

• Duration - Amount of time these requests take, distribution of latency measurements

  histogram_quantile(0.99, sum(rate(request_duration_seconds_bucket{job="..."}[1m])) by (le))
  

Modelling this for every service will give a consistent overview of how the system is behaving.

RED is a good proxy for user happiness.

• The RED Method: How to Instrument Your Services

The Four Golden Signals

Similar to RED, but includes saturation

If you can only measure four metrics of your user-facing system, focus on:

• Latency - the time it takes to service a request
  • Distinguish between the latency of successful requests vs failed requests
• Traffic - a measure of how much demand is being placed on the system
  • For web services, this is usually requests per second
    • Could also split by the nature of the request, like lists vs gets
  • For storage systems, this might be read and writes per second
• Errors - the rate of requests that fail

• Saturation - how “full” the service is

• Google SRE Book - The Four Golden Signals

Resources

• Grafana
  • What is observability?
  • Common observability strategies
    • USE method
    • RED method
    • Four Golden Signals
• The Three Pillars of Observability
• The RED Method - Patterns for instrumentation and monitoring slides
  • Has Prometheus sample queries for USE and RED

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Last update: August 11, 2023
Created: June 3, 2023