4 ms·

> My impression is this is yet another of those Gartner-created hypes... Bang on! Its part of same buzzword bullshittery of Kubernetes/ Cloud native / Micro s

by geodel 3y ago

> My impression is this is yet another of those Gartner-created hypes... Bang on! Its part of same buzzword bullshittery of Kubernetes/ Cloud native / Micro services / observability and so on. Create an out of proportion tech stack that no one would understand and then one needs these APMs to monitor "p99 latencies" because who the fuck knows now on how incoming http request will get processed.

hughesjj 3y ago
..k8s is buzzword bullshittery? Look, there's a bunch of bullshit hype, but I think you're being overly reactionary. Plenty of devs will never touch a profiler (as complex as a cloud based APM simple as jfr), that doesn't mean they don't have use. Plenty of buzzwords conflated hype and misunderstanding with useful technology 'nosql'-> yeah don't try to do olap on nosql but document databases or kvs are still super useful. It's basically a hashmap with some index what's not to like (also using 'nosql' as a term to differentiate between relational databases and ...non relational is already a misnomer) 'big data'-> stupid hype at the beginning and yeah you can have a functioning product without it but try leading a business without any data to make a decision 'cloud'-> colocated data centers and timesharing have been useful things for decades but man do I love having an API to formalize it rather than calling up the onsite data tech and having a phonecall to do anything (that or a multi day email chain) 'microservices'-> yeah it's intractible if you atomize your app, but splitting application boundaries and defining contracts makes it a lot easier to horizontally scale, and it's cheaper in the end of you do it right. Also functions as a service are great for glue code and infra IMHO. The longer I get in my career the more I see that wading through the bullshit is needed to know wtf I'm talking about. It's similar to science communications, where the actual researchers will figure out something cool and useful but situational and contextual, and then the zeitgeist completely distorts the findings beyond any measure of recognition
marcosdumay 3y ago
To make it clear, monitoring p99 latency is very often a good thing. You just don't need a fully featured APM package to do that. People have been doing that for decades, for example by running a script on their server logs.
- steveBK123 3y ago
  > "for example by running a script on their server logs" Exactly! There's lots of stuff you can do before you write a $1M check to one of these APM SaaS. Timestamp each hop. Do your percentiles on a trailing X day window each morning. Alert on worrying moves in the p99/95/whatever. Make sure you don't run out of disk/memory/database by like.. alerting when they get to 80/90/whatever %. Amazing footgun to not monitor this simple thing. Have a process that serves as a reasonable proxy for "busy-ness" / bottlenecks. ie - gateways, Monitor the % CPU over X minute windows. If the CPU stays saturated for N minutes, something is bottlenecking. Here's another secret - you want to also monitor for the opposite. Have processes that are "workers" of some sort that should always have load during business hours as there is always data flowing through? Monitor that their CPU doesn't fall BELOW some threshold (it means something fell over and they aren't doing work). None of this has to alert within milliseconds. Simply having it, and it alerting within a few minutes is better than not having it. Some of these things like latency trends can be run nightly, whatever. That's an interns work for a week or a seniors afternoon. This is easy on s5s (servers). I'm sure you can do this in k8s or whatever too.

by geodel 3y ago

hughesjj 3y ago

..k8s is buzzword bullshittery? Look, there's a bunch of bullshit hype, but I think you're being overly reactionary. Plenty of devs will never touch a profiler (as complex as a cloud based APM simple as jfr), that doesn't mean they don't have use. Plenty of buzzwords conflated hype and misunderstanding with useful technology 'nosql'-> yeah don't try to do olap on nosql but document databases or kvs are still super useful. It's basically a hashmap with some index what's not to like (also using 'nosql' as a term to differentiate between relational databases and ...non relational is already a misnomer) 'big data'-> stupid hype at the beginning and yeah you can have a functioning product without it but try leading a business without any data to make a decision 'cloud'-> colocated data centers and timesharing have been useful things for decades but man do I love having an API to formalize it rather than calling up the onsite data tech and having a phonecall to do anything (that or a multi day email chain) 'microservices'-> yeah it's intractible if you atomize your app, but splitting application boundaries and defining contracts makes it a lot easier to horizontally scale, and it's cheaper in the end of you do it right. Also functions as a service are great for glue code and infra IMHO. The longer I get in my career the more I see that wading through the bullshit is needed to know wtf I'm talking about. It's similar to science communications, where the actual researchers will figure out something cool and useful but situational and contextual, and then the zeitgeist completely distorts the findings beyond any measure of recognition

marcosdumay 3y ago

To make it clear, monitoring p99 latency is very often a good thing. You just don't need a fully featured APM package to do that. People have been doing that for decades, for example by running a script on their server logs.

steveBK123 3y ago
> "for example by running a script on their server logs" Exactly! There's lots of stuff you can do before you write a $1M check to one of these APM SaaS. Timestamp each hop. Do your percentiles on a trailing X day window each morning. Alert on worrying moves in the p99/95/whatever. Make sure you don't run out of disk/memory/database by like.. alerting when they get to 80/90/whatever %. Amazing footgun to not monitor this simple thing. Have a process that serves as a reasonable proxy for "busy-ness" / bottlenecks. ie - gateways, Monitor the % CPU over X minute windows. If the CPU stays saturated for N minutes, something is bottlenecking. Here's another secret - you want to also monitor for the opposite. Have processes that are "workers" of some sort that should always have load during business hours as there is always data flowing through? Monitor that their CPU doesn't fall BELOW some threshold (it means something fell over and they aren't doing work). None of this has to alert within milliseconds. Simply having it, and it alerting within a few minutes is better than not having it. Some of these things like latency trends can be run nightly, whatever. That's an interns work for a week or a seniors afternoon. This is easy on s5s (servers). I'm sure you can do this in k8s or whatever too.