Editor’s note: This post was originally written for the Scalyr blog. You can check out the original here.
In his book “How to Measure Anything,” management consultant and author Douglas Hubbard states that “anything can be measured.” Hubbard argues that something that can be observed lends itself to being measured.
How can this apply to software development and operations? Well, in today’s world of increasingly complex IT systems, you can’t afford not to measure anything and everything. But in order to observe and then measure something, it needs to meet the literal definition of observability, meaning that a system’s internal state must be exposed externally. This allows you to measure it. With observability, you find out not only that your system malfunctioned, but also why. This is done with data from logs, metrics, and traces.
Continue reading “StatsD: How to Measure Anything in Your System”