Deep Dive, EPL Dotplots

While working at RIM, I had the privilege of working with some brilliant engineers. During that time I developed a few of the techniques that I’ll be describing; the EPD (Event-Pair-Difference) graph described in my previous post and the EPL (Event-Pair-Latency) Dotplot are a few of them. Continue reading “Deep Dive, EPL Dotplots”

Shades of Grey

System failures are often not black and white, but shades of grey (gray?)..

Detecting and alerting on “performance-challenged” system components are a lot more difficult than detecting black or white (catastrophic failures). The metrics used are usually of the “time vs. latency” or “time vs. event count” variety, often aggregated and, often by using averages. All of these tend to obscure what we are looking for and have a very low “signal to noise ratio“.

Continue reading “Shades of Grey”