“We paid for a bunch of tools but we don’t know what we should be looking at. There are tons of charts that don’t seem to mean anything!” Software monitoring, how does it work? By Jeremy Hicks.
If you talk to people about software monitoring you’ve inevitably heard something similar to this. With so many possible metrics it can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. Even with curated dashboards there is inherent confusion about what is important. A great way to get started is to apply the 4 “Golden Signals” of Latency, Errors, Traffic, and Saturation (L.E.T.S.). These four concerns provide a fairly generic framework you can use to understand your software and infrastructure.
Applying L.E.T.S. you might be concerned about:
- Latency: How long does it take to get food to a customer?
- Errors: How often are we unable to make a meal or have to comp a free meal?
- Traffic: How many customers are we taking in (and when)?
- Saturation: How many meals can employees actually complete and serve at the same time?
Latency metrics will help you decide if you need to hire more cooks, servers, or upgrade equipment. Errors will help you measure improvements from better training, staffing, and equipment. Traffic helps you understand how much staff you need, when you need them most, and when you can schedule fewer. Measuring customer traffic may even help you decide when it is time to expand! Saturation can help uncover scheduling deficiencies, issues preparing certain popular dishes in parallel, and other unknown efficiency gaps.
Monitoring these concerns would allow you to make informed decisions on scaling aspects of your business and the impact of any changes Excellent read!
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