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📊IOP Systems Talks Fearless Instrumentation at Scale

Minimize the cost of adding instrumentation without sacrificing performance

TL;DR

IOP Systems, formerly Twitter's infrastructure team, discusses techniques for 'fearless instrumentation' that minimize the cost of adding instrumentation to production services. Rezolus, an open-source project, uses eBPF for low-overhead monitoring.

IOP Systems, the ex-infrastructure performance team at Twitter, is discussing 'fearless instrumentation' at scale, aiming to minimize the cost of adding instrumentation to production services. This is crucial for developers and ops teams who need to monitor system behavior and diagnose performance issues without incurring significant overhead. Rezolus, an open-source project, uses eBPF to offer Prometheus exposition with low overhead, and metriken, a metrics library, uses a link-time hack to discover metrics. The talk covers different metrics types, including counters, gauges, and histograms, with costs ranging from 5 nanoseconds to over 1 microsecond, depending on the implementation and contention.

IOP Systems Talks Fearless Instrumentation at Scale — InfoQ

Key Points

1

IOP Systems, formerly Twitter's infrastructure team, discusses 'fearless instrumentation' at scale, aiming to minimize the cost of adding instrumentation to production services.

2

Rezolus, an open-source project, uses eBPF for low-overhead monitoring, offering Prometheus exposition with minimal overhead.

3

Metriken, a metrics library, uses a link-time hack to discover metrics and instrument libraries, reducing the overhead of instrumentation.

4

The talk covers different metrics types, including counters, gauges, and histograms, with costs ranging from 5 nanoseconds to over 1 microsecond.

5

Histograms can have a cost difference of up to 1400x, depending on the implementation and contention.

Why It Matters

If you're running production services and need to monitor system behavior, IOP Systems' 'fearless instrumentation' techniques can help minimize the cost of adding monitoring without sacrificing performance. Rezolus, using eBPF, offers low-overhead monitoring, and metriken reduces the overhead of instrumentation with a link-time hack.

IOP SystemsRezolusmetrikeneBPFperformance-monitoring

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does this matter?

If you're running production services and need to monitor system behavior, IOP Systems' 'fearless instrumentation' techniques can help minimize the cost of adding monitoring without sacrificing performance. Rezolus, using eBPF, offers low-overhead monitoring, and metriken reduces the overhead of instrumentation with a link-time hack.

What happened?

IOP Systems, formerly Twitter's infrastructure team, discusses techniques for 'fearless instrumentation' that minimize the cost of adding instrumentation to production services. Rezolus, an open-source project, uses eBPF for low-overhead monitoring.

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