Chapter 6. Measurement

This chapter covers

  • Monitoring monoliths versus microservices
  • Monitoring systems with many small parts
  • Using scatterplots to visualize system behavior
  • Measuring messages and services
  • Using invariants to validate system health

Microservice systems need to be monitored. More than that, they need to be measured. The traditional approach to monitoring, where you collect time-series metrics such as CPU load and query response times, isn’t as useful when you have a system of many small moving parts. There are too many microservices to think about each one individually.

Instead, we must widen the concept of system observation. You want to measure the system, rather than monitor it. A microservice system grows organically ...

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