Good morning! Over the next couple of weeks we are going to be hosting a series of posts here on instrumentation.
It started, as most trouble does, on Twitter.
pro tip: if you think debugging is hard, it's probably because you aren't instrumenting your code enough.
— Charity Majors (@mipsytipsy) December 30, 2016
In the ginormous thread that followed, we heard a little bit of everything: joy and angst, love professed for debuggers and helpful links for tooling. Famous programmers admitted out loud that they still didn’t know how to instrument code. And more than a few people begged: please write about this!
@mipsytipsy instrumenting is hard, not debugging. :) One of those things I have to relearn each time I need it.
— Josh Lytle (@skwashua) December 31, 2016
But I want to learn more about instrumentation too! So I grabbed my friend Julia Evans, who is the best at asking questions, and we decided to ask a bunch of questions together.
For the next two or three weeks we will be publishing roughly one piece per day on instrumentation. We have awesome people writing on everything from databases to networking, distributed systems to Linux internals. I’m SO excited.
@mipsytipsy I love my debugger. I refer to it as "unambiguous mode".
— Marc Mims (@semifor) December 31, 2016
Our first piece will be by Antoine Grondin, and it will start with the basics: is your service broken or not? He explains a super useful set of basic metrics you can use to find out!