Real Time Monitoring : Know Everything

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 16:06:00 -0400

Instagram released an awesome overview of how they handled the incredible scaling issues associated with 40+ million people using the service. Their theory of monitoring everything was exactly what I’ve been trying to do at @EggDropApp.

A great tool they highlighted was Statsd, an open source monitoring server from Etsy. It can collect basic stats from any service in your system with minimum overhead and generate easy-to-use graphs on the fly. The basic stats can be simple counters or timing that can be averaged over selectable periods. The interface is UDP-based and a breeze to use.

This is something that any startup can use. Given that, I tossed together an EC2 AMI that launches a standalone Statsd server ready for action. Launch it in your environment and all you need to worry about is integrating stats. Grab the link below and give it a whirl.

https://aws.amazon.com/amis/statsd-on-amazon-linux-2012-03-ami

Check out Instagram’s incredible post and the original blog post from Etsy.

http://instagram-engineering.tumblr.com/post/20541814340/keeping-instagram-up-with-over-a-million-new-users-in

http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/02/15/measure-anything-measure-everything/

* Minor note on logging into the Graphite web:

Log into the box

$ cd /opt/graphite/webapp/graphite
$ sudo python manage.py createsuperuser stats

Follow the steps to create your new user

Open up the site in your browser and log in.

Great UTF8 cheat sheet for PHP

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 20:38:35 -0500

Great UTF8 cheat sheet for PHP:

If you’re developing a backend in PHP, this is definitely worth a look. Unless you’re limiting the area of your app, get ready for international up front.

Hacker Notes

Real Time Monitoring : Know Everything

Great UTF8 cheat sheet for PHP