The transition from 40 years of successful licensed software development to an agile-based SaaS business involves many challenges. Octo, a real-time streaming metrics framework built around InfluxDB time series database, is aimed specifically at one: simplifying the collection and visualization of mission-critical operational data to enable a culture change toward metrics immersion and product ownership. Learn more by viewing this InfluxDays NYC 2019 presentation.

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Octo
AND THE DEVOPS EVOLUTION @ ORACLE
Ian Van Hoven, Oracle Engineering Services
InfluxDays NYC ✣ March 13, 2019
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Let me tell you a (user) story

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Oracle aims to achieve 99.99%+ availability and industry-
leading performance across the Cloud portfolio
To delight existing customers, attract new ones,
and enable Oracle teams to innovate

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Achieving our SLA goals requires evolutionary change in
how we monitor and measure our products
And – especially – a cultural shift toward metrics immersion,
supported and driven by ubiquitous, user-friendly tooling

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Octo will leverage proven industry-standard
technology demonstrably scalable to Oracle's
global footprint and volume
While complementing existing M&M tech … and allowing us
to leverage innovation and attract/retain top talent

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The 1st order priorities are to improve Oracle Cloud
customer satisfaction & protect revenue
Commercialization of Octo is explicitly a 2nd order priority

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SOUNDS EASY

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Scene from the Past

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Scene from the Past

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Looks good.
Let’s do that.

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Modern Day Silos Aplenty (Teams, Tools, Data)

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Modern Day I have that data. Also, you don’t get that data.

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Modern Day PreDevOps Monitoring Alert

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Legacy MindsetModern Day PreDevOps Math $fear{abstract} != $fear{concrete}

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Why would devs ever want to be on-call?
It would eliminate our incentive to ship.
Modern Day PreDevOps Mindset

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If you don’t like
something…

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Octo Is
A stunningly innovative product acronym…
Oracle Cloud Telemetry (Oracle)

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Octo Also Is
A real-time streaming metrics framework...
• Conceptualized at May 2017 leadership offsite; GA since Thanksgiving 2018
• Aimed directly at enabling culture change of product ownership & metrics immersion across Oracle
• Aggregator & cross-correlator of discrete time series data: metrics from diverse sources in one view
• Sharing and collaboration tool to connect colleagues from teams across all of Oracle
• Easy to...
• FIND: goto/octo (browser alias), /go octo (Slack command)
• USE: up & running in seconds (read) or minutes (write)
• SHARE: include graph URLs & images in Slack, email, ticket, preso, wall-screens, etc.
• Common UX: Octo for Fusion looks/works like Octo for TOA, RNT, Eloqua, Taleo, etc.
• Simple, secure, declarative, RESTful write API – abstracted from data pipeline & b/e data tier
• Built with proven, scalable industry-standard tech: nginx, memcache, Kafka, InfluxDB/TICK, Grafana, etc.
• Integrated with standard Cloud-wide tools: Slack, PagerDuty, Akamai, Dyn, CatchPoint, 1000 Eyes, Jira, etc.
• Data source & product/property agnostic: collect data any way/where – then visualize & share w/ Octo
• Imperfect – which was the plan all along

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Octo Is Not
• Monitoring tool or alerting framework
• Replacement for [insert monitoring solution here]
• Troubleshooting cure-all
• Data analytics warehouse
• Auto-remediation framework
• Application profiler / testbench
• Asset management system
• Runtime dependency
• Log processor/aggregator/analytics
• Big data (map/reduce) platform
• Reporting platform (canned or ad-hoc)

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Octo Use Cases
• General Golden Signal Awareness: Business KPIs, Availability, RPS, Latency, Errors, Consumption
Every SaaS engineer (Dev, SRE, NOC, CS) should know peak weekday FE RPS – and be aware of
(and responsive to) any WoW divergence
• Troubleshooting Accelerator: quickly narrow down outage scope, identify next step/s & escalation PoC/s
”Back End” dashboard shows sharp DB read/write RPS plunges; anyone can infer something amiss at DB tier (net? sys? sw?);
pivot to specialized tool/s to discover precise failure RC/s
“SaaS Cloud Web FE” dashboard shows sharp increase in LB 4xx error RPS, sharp drop in LB 2xx OK RPS, drop to 0 RPS in HTTPD RPS;
pivot to LB forensics & log analysis to identify IP whitelist RC
• ChM Validation, Incremental Rollout A|B Test: ethereal/point-in-time dashboarding
NetEng, SvcOps & GNC monitor one dashboard showing LB VIPs/throughput/RPS, app RPS/latency, business KPIs,
APM availability, etc. to confirm GBIC swap successful
Time shift (HoH, DoD, WoW, MoM) allows quick analysis of impact/delta for new code/infra/etc.

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Octo Use Cases (cont’d)
• Presentations
• Product usage awareness (features)
• Pre-emptive capacity/scaling strategic planning (optimize or add capacity)
• Reactive troubleshooting (post-outage start)
• Slow degradation catch
• Corpus of “detailed” data for after-the-fact analysis (not necessarily on permanent graphs/dashboards)
• Per-customer usage/performance/availability

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So…?

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Octo Today
The Good…
• 8 “customers” onboarded; steady trickle of inbound activation requests; live in 5 PoPs (NorAm & EMEA)
• FE API latency dropping as RPS increases (~35ms at 50th %ile)
• “Shoot me the Octo graph” & “Put it on the Octo dash” heard more & more often in meetings/hallways
• Octo acquiring/retaining real estate on Oracle SaaS Cloud NOC “big board” & on hallway TVs
• Bi-weekly releases live to site, mostly error free 
• Continued investments in o4o (“Octo for Octo”) – separate parallel ecosystem to customer Octo (thanks, Paul)
• Energized & ambitious team, collaborating closely with customers
The Imperfect…
• No customer self-onboarding; minimal onboarding automation; no read API; no DWH integration
• Time-shift CPU overhead driving investments in downsampling via CQ (near term) and Kapacitor (long term)
• Code and config living together in sin; general config messiness; documentation gaps
• Still in PIPD phase (evolutionary precursor to CICD)

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Why Influx[DB|Data]? (Non-Exhaustive Un-Sorted List)
1. Purpose built for our use case (streaming metrics)
2. O/S with strong/focused/visionary company & active community behind it (ala Elastic, Mongo, etc.)
3. Seamless integration with leading visualization & alerting/messaging platforms
4. So intuitive/easy even a VP can use it
5. TICK stack simplifies key considerations around collection/ingest & aggregation/downsampling
6. Horizontal scaling via TSDB clustering when needed
7. Not jerks; easy to work/collab with; have seen almost everything; very responsive; super patient *
8. Givers of sage advice ☛ Paul Dix: “Don’t monitor your monitoring system with your monitoring system”
9. See #1

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Questions?