Visualizing System Latency
Besides the many practical lessons emphasized in Jack Clark’s interview with Adrian Cockcroft on ZDNet—luckly I’ve had the chance to see some of Cockcroft’s presentations about Netflix architecture and also talk to him directly—one thing that sticked with me was the ending paragraph:
The thing I’ve been publicly asking for has been better IO in the cloud. Obviously I want SSDs in there. We’ve been asking cloud vendors to do that for a while. With Cassandra, we’ve had to go onto horizontal scale and use the internal disks and triple replicate across availability zones, so you end up with a triple-redundant data store that is careful not to overload the disks.
That reminded me of this old ACM article authored by Brendan Gregg:
When I/O latency is presented as a visual heat map, some intriguing and beautiful patterns can emerge. These patterns provide insight into how a system is actually performing and what kinds of latency end-user applications experience. Many characteristics seen in these patterns are still not understood, but so far their analysis is revealing systemic behaviors that were previously unknown.
I was wondering if in the NoSQL databases space (and data storage space in general) are there any of the monitoring tools that provide such advanced visualization of latency data. Do you know any?
Original title and link: Visualizing System Latency (©myNoSQL)
