Intuition Engineering with Docker

Gergo Horanyi Blocked Unblock Follow Following Aug 9, 2016

This post presents a suggestion for a docker monitoring solution combining two awesome tools already at your disposal: Netflix Vizceral and your brain. We bring them together and adapt to a Docker environment. Scroll down for technical details.

Your phone rings. It’s not the usual tone, though. Nope, you quickly realise it’s your “best friend”, PagerDuty, nagging you again.

Ah, the standard routine: acknowledge the incident, open dashboards, acknowledge more calls, head to slack to alert everyone, start bringing up logs…

I’ve had my fair share of situations like this. Working at Prezi’s Infra team we had to make sure the core infrastructure was always ready to serve our 75 million users. This meant several hundred servers and a few dozen micro services had to seamlessly work together. But there is this Murphy guy: things will inevitably go wrong at some point.

Sure, we try to build highly available systems. Systems where an outage of one service can be tolerated by the rest. But trust me, you can’t prepare for everything. And … It’s ok, it’s fine. You shouldn’t. Unless we are building rocket control systems, bugs are ok. But we should have tools to understand what’s happening in our systems.