System-Wide Transparency

System-wide transparency

Back in Transparency, we saw how individual instances can reveal their state. That’s the start of a total story about transparency. Now we’ll look at how to assemble a picture of system-wide health from the individual instances’ information.

The first place to start is by defining what we need from our efforts. When dealing with the system as a whole, two fundamental questions need to be answered:

1. Are users receiving a good experience?
2. Is the system creating the economic value we want?

Notice that the question, “Is everything running?” isn’t on that list. Even at a small scale, we should be able to survive periods where everything isn’t running. At ...