Blog de Joe Freeman

Inter-system and Intra-system tracing capabilities are a must in modern distributed architectures and in systems where dashboards and triage must be done without cracking open the production environment for on-box work. Teams need to understand and verify the lineage of inbound requests that end up in data stores and in outbound calls or notifications to other systems. Lineage and Observability NFRs are the requirement that creates the need for inter and Intra team correlation capabilities.  Everyone should have tracing and monitoring Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs) that describe their observability needs. Those NFRs should describe how a system must support tracking work through a system from the time it enters until the time it transitions to at rest or the time it communicates with other systems.  Teams without these NFRs often end up scrambling to provide production metrics and debugging tools during production events. YouTube Vid...

A coworker created a Chrome Extension that acts as a zero-infrastructure dashboard. It provides a simple home page that displays service health and support or documentation links related to that service.  The plugin reads JSON file/text to make service calls and build the dashboard. The following picture shows 5 services across up to 6 environments.  The top service does not have a Production environment. The bottom service represents a 3rd external service that has one test environment and one production environment. The  IsItUp  chrome executes health checks via HTTP/HTTPS calls.  The extension requires connectivity to the services being monitored. Video Walk-through The video explains various cell examples and describes how the extension might be used. The plugin used for the video was downloaded from the  Chrome Web Store  . Video created with version available Jan 21 2017 Cell Explanation Each cell contains one Service Status plu...