Everyone knows monitoring enables data-driven decisions, and therefore improves the overall user experience of our software. But Continuous Monitoring greatly enhances collaboration between our Dev & Ops teams. Collecting infrastructure- and application-level health and performance metrics, when they are organized and we can act on them, prevents errors and failures in the software for our users. This session will walk you through our experience in setting up a monitoring framework throughout our entire DevOps life cycle. We will talk about challenges and innovations, and how we utilized different Azure services such as Stream Analytics, Azure Functions, and Service Bus to develop a centralized Monitoring system for our microservices.

1. 6/30/2017© kCura LLC. All rights reserved.
MONITORING AT SCALE:
CONTINUOUS MONITORING
Sunghee Choi
Saba Jamalian

2. Hometown: South Korea
Company: kCura
What I do: Software Engineering
Manager
Fun Fact: I was an engineer when
signed up for this presentation and
now I’m a manager!
Sunghee Choi

3. Hometown: Shiraz, Iran
Company: Forte Group
What I do: Software Engineer
Fun Fact:I have watched all the
episodes of the TV
series more than 20 times!
Saba Jamalian

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e-Discovery
Used to search, analyze, and act on
data to tell the story of a case quickly
and easily during litigation and
investigation
About Us
Chicago-based
e-discovery software
company

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What I’ll Cover
Continuous Monitoring at kCura
Monitoring Goals
Monitoring Microservices
Monitoring Tools - Demo

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• We’re on a path toward a fully SaaS product
• Monitoring GOAL: To Get Visibility on User Experience
Takeaways:
• Why active and continuous monitoring is essential in the world of SaaS
• How Monitoring differs for Microservices vs. traditional software architectures
• How a Software development company can implement a monitoring habit
Motivation for this Presentation
• is on Netflix! Make sure to watch it if you haven’t watched already!

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kCura’s way of
Continuous Monitoring

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• Automated product health check
• Resiliency
• Automated incident escalation
• Get overall health status – real time
• Not to be technologically dependent to a tool or framework
The Goal

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• kCura Application Performance Monitoring framework
• Enables developers to collect metrics in code;
– Counters
– Gauges
– HealthChecks
– Meters
– Timers
kAPM

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Database
API
APM Framework
Jenkins
Service Bus
Functions
Functions
New Relic
Slack
DocumentDbAlerts Definitions
ServiceNow
HealthChecks
Monitoring Architecture

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• Treat New Relic like a metrics storage
Custom Alerts

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Database
API
APM Framework
Jenkins
Service Bus
Functions
Functions
New Relic
Slack
DocumentDbAlerts
Definitions
ServiceNow
HealthChecks
Custom Function
Alerts

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Monitoring Goals at kCura

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Monitoring Goals
• Performance Monitoring
– Evaluate performance with production data and scenarios
– Identify workflow bottlenecks

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Monitoring Goals
• Performance Monitoring
– Evaluate performance with production data and scenarios
– Identify workflow bottlenecks

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Monitoring Goals
• Decision Making
– Learn from users to plan for future features
– Enhance loved parts of the software
– Gain more insights

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Monitoring Goals
• Proactive Maintenance
– Identify errors before customer
– Automated recovery
– Early problem detection
– Resilient software
• Example scenario; Failed agents recovery

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Proactive Maintenance: Failed Agents Recovery
Agent Failed
Agent
Recovery
Send Alert
DocDb

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Proactive Maintenance: Failed Agents Recovery

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Monitoring Goals
• Predictive Analysis
– Identify trends in alerts and errors
– Predict spikes
– Automated scaling

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Monitoring Goals
• Security
– Detect intrusions
– Prevent software maluses
– Fight DDoS attacks

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– Recording of events
– Disconnected
– Event streams
– Stack trace
– Observation
– Connected & Engaged
– State
– Health & Performance
Monitoring vs. Logging
Logging Monitoring

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Monitoring Levels
Application
Operating System
Infrastructure

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Monitoring Microservices

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on the topic of UNIX philosophy
Douglas McEllroy
“Write programs that
do one thing and do it
well. Write programs
to work together.”

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Highly decoupled services with
isolated scope of responsibility
that asynchronously
communicate with each other.
• Components
– Concurrent execution
– Independent upgrades
– Independent scaling
• Services
– Isolated failure
– Resilience
– Isolated all the way to the hardware
– Autonomous
• Distributed environment
Microservices Definition

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Monitoring Microservices
• Monitor Application Containers
Application
Containers
Operating System
Infrastructure

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Monitoring Microservices
• Monitor APIs
– API Availability
– Processing Time
– Reachability
– Security

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Monitoring Microservices
• Visualize Interactions
– Consider geo-located Services

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Conway’s Law
M. Conway
“Organizations which
design systems ... are
constrained to
produce designs
which are copies of
the communication
structures of these
organizations”

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Monitoring Microservices
• Monitoring Organizational Structure
Ref: Thenewstack.io

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Monitoring Tools

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Monitoring Tools
Azure Application Insights
– Azure Service
– No infrastructure setup required
– Detect exceptions and performance issues
– Visual studio integration

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Monitoring Tools

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Monitoring Tools
– SaaS
– Requires agents installed on VMs
– REST API for custom events
– Custom dashboards and alerts
– APIs for stored metrics

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Monitoring Tools

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Demo

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Conclusion
• Why active and continuous monitoring is essential in the world of SaaS
• How Monitoring differs for Microservices vs. traditional software architectures
• How a Software development company can implement a monitoring habit
• It’s essential to keep asking ourselves how our software is doing!
@SabaJamalian
www.sabaj.me
me@sabaj.me