Introducing Vector: Netflix's On-Host Performance Monitoring Tool • Hacker News Board

Re: Introducing Vector: Netflix's On-Host Performance Monitoring Tool

#61

Post by nathan_scott » Fri, Apr 10, 2015, 2:01 AM UTC

voltagex_ wrote: post #42

CWuestefeld wrote: post #27

It's enormously frustrating to me that the Windows platform is so far behind. I've been researching for a rebuild of our ecommerce site with the idea of a modern microservice architecture. Team skillset and some other considerations dictate a .Net environment. Netflix and other companies have created a really rich platform, between logging and monitoring technologies like this; message queueing; deployment; and so on…

I suspect that you could extend PCP (the monitoring component of this dashboard) to support Windows' performance counters. The profiling capabilities are certainly there.

PCP can export many hundreds of Windows-specific counters (which it accesses via the PDH APIs). The Windows build does need some love though, as the OP mentioned - its out of date and needs a regular contributor to bring it up to date with the latest PCP sources.

Then Vector should Just Work (tm) for Windows servers too.

Re: Introducing Vector: Netflix's On-Host Performance Monitoring Tool

#62

Post by nathan_scott » Fri, Apr 10, 2015, 2:05 AM UTC

Thaxll wrote: post #29

Not sure what the difference is between that and Collect + Graphite / InfluxDB.

There are many, many differences - there's some books about PCP that might help clarify PCP design points, see: http://pcp.io/documentation.html

Re: Introducing Vector: Netflix's On-Host Performance Monitoring Tool

#63

Post by nathan_scott » Fri, Apr 10, 2015, 3:23 AM UTC

xbryanx wrote: post #21

I'm curious how this compares to Zabbix's agent and server. Does PCP give you finer grained details, or is it possibly more lightweight?

PCP is much finer-grained than Zabbix in terms of the metrics it makes available (esp. from the Linux kernel); not sure on Zabbix costs but PCP is quite light on all resources (mem, cpu, net) and very robust.

I've worked on production systems where everything else was failing (hardware, kernel, applications) but PCP kept chugging along, recording and telling the sad story to anyone that would listen.

Re: Introducing Vector: Netflix's On-Host Performance Monitoring Tool

#64

Post by wantab » Fri, Apr 10, 2015, 8:29 PM UTC

CWuestefeld wrote: post #57

wantab wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web was built, and runs on, *nix/BSD. Windows is an outlier. Windows can't even get the slashes going the right way. There's a reason 80% of internet traffic does not use Windows.

I'm not sure how that was supposed to be helpful. I also don't think it's strictly true. For sure the underlying networking came from Unix. But as for the web itself, once we got to real dynamic content, it seems to me that Microsoft were the ones that got things moving. While the Unix world was mired in the awful world of CGI, Microsoft gave us high-performance ISAPI, and then Cold Fusion (also on the Windows platfo…

Your examples presume there was something better than CGI at the time and the other products are better than something else. For one, I wouldn't be caught dead using any of the products you mentioned.

You claim IIS by using a ZDNet article from two years ago but the reality is IIS is number three behind Nginx and Apache. Still, being a distant #2 is nothing to brag about.

Now you're trying to claim clients are what powers the web but that's not the topic. What an amateur uses does not define what the professional uses. And to claim not wanting to be on the bleeding edge of things is no excuse for falling behind. Firefox and Chrome knocked IE off its perch years ago by being on the bleeding edge.