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Module 11 · System Design · Five more whole designs

Is it up? (metrics and monitoring)

Before you start. You need Design the Whole Thing (the interview, assembled), where a design starts by counting, and nothing goes on the whiteboard until a number pays for it. You also need One request, forty services (distributed tracing), where a trace followed one request through forty services. A trace explains one bad request. This lesson is the other half: how you find out, before any customer tells you, that requests are going bad at all.

Lesson 55 of 73 in System Design

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In this lesson

  • March 1999: NetSaint, and a check that asks one question
  • The time series: a chart at the foot of every bed
  • Counter and gauge: a number that only climbs, and a number that wanders
  • Scrape: the nurse comes to the bed
  • Downsampling: keep the detail for a week, the outline for a year
  • Alert: wake a person for what the patient feels

Terms it explains: sample, time series, counter, rate, gauge, scrape, downsampling, alert, labels, histogram, write path, burn rate, cardinality.

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