This year’s Monitorama was another success for @obfuscurity and the monitoring community. My one line observation of this years event is that the event was “less pragmatic” than last year. I would rate the more abstract qualities of quality, diversity, and my overall desire to attend the same as last year – high. My personal preference for this, and most, conferences is pragmatism and so I call this out; my ranking of presentations certainly reflects this, more so than any general vote of quality.

Monitorama 2015 video: https://vimeo.com/channels/933981

Without further ado, my ranked recommendations for Monitorama 2015 review:

Must Watch

Working with Riemann

Kyle provides a good overview of Riemann, his “part time project”. While not an in depth discussion of Riemann, Kyle does a good job of covering the core concepts and breadth of what Riemann can accomplish. An excellent source if one is trying to discover if and where Riemann can be utilized.

The Dark Art of Container Monitoring

Loris demonstrated container monitoring with his relatively new tool sysdig and cAdvisor from Google. This is an excellent overview and demo of both tools. Additionally, Loris demos a commercial product that takes sysdig to the next level, providing a web based dashboard of an entire running cluster – sysdig cloud.

Heka (workshop)

Rob presents an architectural overview of the Heka stream processing engine. He discusses some of its many use-cases. This presentation will convey to the viewer enough to determine if Heka is appropriate for potential tasks.

Insightful

If you make it past the first three “Must Watch” presentations then the following are where I would recommend spending your time next. The first two are less pragmatic, but cover lessons learned and potentially positive ways of looking at monitoring issues as learned from Netflix. The Last is an good overview and introduction to Druid.

Operational Insight

Monitoring Netflix Content Delivery Network

Druid (workshop)

Intriguing

To continue exploring the Monitorama 2015, the presentations below were my pick of other ‘above the median’ (not everyone can be above 50%, only half of us), presentations; if you like my choices so far, hopefully these will also be intriguing to you.

Practical & Robust Anomaly Detection

Stream Processing inside Librato

A People’s History of Microservices

Bosun (workshop)

The Evolution of Monitoring Systems at Google

Netflix Instance Performance Analysis Requirements

Honorable Mention

There was one presentation that was less general, but for the audience where it’s appropriate, it is certainly worth a watch .. not to mention any names like “Todd”.

Cyanite (workshop)

Cyanite is a merger of Graphite and Cassandra. For large metric storage it appears to be a project certainly worth investigating.

The Origins of Monitorama

Finally, in digging through twitter postings, I discovered that @obfuscurity has made a guest contribution to the Librato blog and covers:

Blog: The Origins of Monitorama

Thank you Jason.