Ops on Bill Glover

Instrument Go applications with Wavefront

hello@bill.dev (Bill) — Fri, 17 Jul 2020 06:00:00 +0000

In the Part One of this series, I looked back at my experience with using application logs to gain insight into application and system performance. Despite the wealth of information these logs contain, much of it goes untapped. The advent of log analytics saw a step change in the information we were able to retrieve from his goldmine of untapped data. This served as a catalyst, prompting both development teams and businesses to demand more insight from their applications. But this didn’t come without challenges. The performance challenges and the coordination required to reliably obtain business metrics from log-based solutions are not insignificant. This has given rise to a new era in observability, the era of the metric.

Logging & Metrics: It’s a Journey

hello@bill.dev (Bill) — Thu, 09 Jul 2020 06:00:00 +0000

The Power of Logs

A few years ago, I did some work for an online retailer. The systems were complex. Over the years, the business had layered an online presence atop of systems built to serve the needs of disconnected physical stores. Change was hard. Despite this complexity, the data used to assess eCommerce performance were remarkably simple. Most prominent were the Requests Per Second (RPS) served by the web servers. Traffic patterns were so predictable that morning dips, lunchtime spikes and absolute numbers were all familiar to the business.

Privacy Conscious Web Logs

hello@bill.dev (Bill) — Tue, 31 Mar 2020 20:16:35 +0000

Anyone looking for statistics on their blog will find themselves pushed towards the big names in web analytics. In return for statistics, you are encouraged, if not required, to gather more information about your readers than strictly necessary. Even if you gather statistics from your server logs, you are almost certainly logging unnecessary information about visitors. It doesn’t have to be this way.

I’ve been attempting to revive my blog recently and wanted some insight into the posts I’ve published. Inspired by Laura Kalbag’s commitment not to track her readers (see “I don’t track you”), I wondered if I could achieve the same results with my Nginx hosted blog.