It's common to think of monitoring as something just to alert you when things are going wrong. At Robust Perception we believe in Inclusive Monitoring, where all aspects of systems are monitored and available to provide insight and drive decisions.
Reliable Insights
A blog on monitoring, scale and operational Sanity
Systems such as Consul perform healthchecking of local services and expose this information to other machines within the cluster. Does this mean that the service will work when you try to talk to it?
Traffic from users to your servers isn't a steady stream, it waxes and wanes over the day and week. The peak-to-mean ratio is your primary tool to avoid outages or unnecessary costs due to this.
Just after you've launched is not the best time to find out that you can't handle the load you predicted, or that running costs are much higher than you'd like. By estimating the operational parameters of your system as you design you can gain confidence that the system will work as you expect.
Caches are a common feature of distributed systems, often added to improve performance. There are three main types of cache, and knowing about them will help you design robust systems.
