Talk delivered at SCaLE10x, Los Angeles 2012.
Cloud Computing introduces new challenges for performance
analysis, for both customers and operators of the cloud. Apart from
monitoring a scaling environment, issues within a system can be
complicated when tenants are competing for the same resources, and are
invisible to each other. Other factors include rapidly changing
production code and wildly unpredictable traffic surges. For
performance analysis in the Joyent public cloud, we use a variety of
tools including Dynamic Tracing, which allows us to create custom
tools and metrics and to explore new concepts. In this presentation
I'll discuss a collection of these tools and the metrics that they
measure. While these are DTrace-based, the focus of the talk is on
which metrics are proving useful for analyzing real cloud issues.