The document discusses the importance of observability as a management strategy for identifying key issues in operations and improving web performance. It outlines the four pillars of web performance—reachability, availability, reliability, and consistency—and emphasizes the value of understanding normal system behavior to predict downtime and manage performance effectively. By implementing observability, organizations can enhance their ability to monitor systems, enabling smarter and faster operations.

1. Why observability matters!
Jeroen Tjepkema
Product Director @ MeasureWorks

2. Observability:
Observability is a management
strategy focused on keeping the
most relevant, important and core
issues at or near the top of an
operations process flow.

3. What is performance?

9. Is this performance?

10. Uncertain waits
Uncertain waits...

11. Unfair waits...

12. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/opinion/sunday/why-waiting-in-line-is-torture.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Unexplained waits...

13. “Both of
fl
ine and online we associate
bad performance with
poor customer service”

14. Reachability Availability Reliability
Can I get
there?
Is it working?
Performance
Fast or Slow? Working
consistent?
4 pillars of web performance

15. Reachability Availability Reliability
Can I get
there?
Is it working?
Performance
Fast or Slow? Working
consistent?
when the delivery of quality is
noticeable but does but does not
influence the user’s preference of
one service over another.
This allows you a position to win
from you competitors.
4 pillars of web performance
Time neutralisation:

16. The reality is, things fail…

17. Performance Budgets Incident Alerts Service Impact
Setting thresholds?

18. Dashboards galore!

19. …did we miss something?

21. 0
15
30
45
60
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60
#
pageviews
Min/Hour
Typical downtime pattern

22. 0
15
30
45
60
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60
#
pageviews
Min/Hour
Regular operations
Typical downtime pattern

23. 0
15
30
45
60
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60
#
pageviews
Min/Hour
Regular operations Alerts?
Typical downtime pattern

24. 0
15
30
45
60
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60
#
pageviews
Min/Hour
Regular operations Alerts? Downtime
Typical downtime pattern

25. 2 examples
Q: Can we
predict downtime?

26. 0
15
30
45
60
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60
#
pageviews
Min/Hour
Example downtime pattern
Regular operations Alerts? Downtime
This is where we want to be!

27. 0
15
30
45
60
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60
#
pageviews
Min/Hour
Example downtime pattern
Regular operations Alerts? Downtime
This is where we want to be!
News

29. c sites
for 4 months:
Behaviour patterns are a
leading indicator to alerts

30. 0
15
30
45
60
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60
#
pageviews
Min/Hour
Example downtime pattern
Time period in which we can detect a persistent
change in pattern per type of monitoring
Social Alerting
Change in click behavior
Performance
alerting

31. Remember:
85-90% of all errors are caused by
degradation in user experience…

32. Another way to look at it

33. Being
Late

34. Alarm
clock
Being
Late
Traf
fi
c

35. Not understanding what normal behavior
looks like makes us do stupid things...

36. Alarm
clock
Being
late
Traf
fi
c
Power
Disaster
Weather
Bills
Health
GPS

37. By measuring behaviour of a
system turns silos into noise and
turns causation into likelihood

38. Predict performance?
Understand what normal is

39. Enter: System Thinking

40. Enter: System Thinking
Enter: System Thinking
making sense of the complexity of your
environment by looking at it in terms of
whole rather than by splitting it down
into silos

41. 41
Internet DB
Load
balancer
Web server App server
Digital
Touchpoint
Datacenter
Application Delivery Chain

42. Multi-vendor
Management
(Multi)
Cloud
providers
42
Internet DB
Load
balancer
Web server App server
Digital
Touchpoint
Datacenter
Application Delivery Chain
External data
providers
CDN
Delivery Quality

43. Multi-vendor
Management
(Multi)
Cloud
providers
43
Internet DB
Load
balancer
Web server App server
Digital
Touchpoint
Datacenter
3d parties
Application Delivery Chain
External data
providers
CDN
Delivery Quality
Marketing Efforts

44. Multi-vendor
Management
(Multi)
Cloud
providers
44
Internet DB
Load
balancer
Web server App server
Digital
Touchpoint
Datacenter
3d parties
Application Delivery Chain
External data
providers
CDN
Performance
Marketing
campaigns
Autonomous
growth
Delivery Quality
Marketing Efforts
Traffic

45. Multi-vendor
Management
(Multi)
Cloud
providers
45
Internet DB
Load
balancer
Web server App server
Digital
Touchpoint
Datacenter
3d parties
Application Delivery Chain
External data
providers
CDN
Performance
Marketing
campaigns
Autonomous
growth
Delivery Quality
Marketing Efforts
Traffic
Span of control?

46. At the same time we
want to speed up
cycle time…

48. Observability?

49. Observability:
Observability is a management
strategy focused on keeping the
most relevant, important and core
issues at or near the top of an
operations process flow.

50. System
Topology
Example: Application Topology

51. System
Telemetry
User Experience Infrastructure metrics

52. Quality
Gates
Automated Performance Test staging environment

53. Applied
AI
Error tracking

54. Implementing
observability will
become your
predictive
superpower...

55. Shift left, Shift Right?
Work smarter, faster…

56. Thanks! More questions?
M: jtjepkema@measureworks.nl
T: @jeroentjepkema
W: www.measureworks.nl