diff --git a/docs/sources/getting-started/strategies.md b/docs/sources/getting-started/strategies.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000000..108234462d1 --- /dev/null +++ b/docs/sources/getting-started/strategies.md @@ -0,0 +1,54 @@ ++++ +title = "Monitoring strategies" +description = "Common monitoring strategies" +keywords = ["grafana", "intro", "guide", "concepts", "methods"] +type = "docs" +[menu.docs] +weight = 500 ++++ + +# Common observability strategies + +When you have a lot to monitor, like a server farm, you need a strategy to decide what is important enough to monitor. This page describes several common methods for choosing what to monitor. + +A logical strategy allows you to make uniform dashboards and scale your observability platform more easily. + +## Guidelines for usage + +- The USE method tells you how happy your machines are, the RED method tells you how happy your users are. +- USE reports on causes of issues. +- RED reports on user experience and is more likely to report symptoms of problems. +- The best practice of alerting is to alert on symptoms rather than causes, so alerting should be done on RED dashboards. + +## USE method + +USE stands for: + +- **Utilization -** Percent time the resource is busy, such as node CPU usage +- **Saturation -** Amount of work a resource has to do, often queue length or node load +- **Errors -** Count of error events + +This method is best for hardware resources in infrastructure, such as CPU, memory, and network devices. For more information, refer to [The USE Method](http://www.brendangregg.com/usemethod.html). + +## RED method + +RED stands for: + +- **Rate -** Requests per second +- **Errors -** Number of requests that are failing +- **Duration -** Amount of time these requests take, distribution of latency measurements + +This method is most applicable to services, especially a microservices environment. For each of your services, instrument the code to expose these metrics for each component. RED dashboards are good for alerting and SLAs. A well-designed RED dashboard is a proxy for user experience. + +For more information, refer to Tom Wilkie's blog post [The RED method: How to instrument your services](https://grafana.com/blog/2018/08/02/the-red-method-how-to-instrument-your-services). + +## The Four Golden Signals + +According to the [Google SRE handbook](https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/monitoring-distributed-systems/#xref_monitoring_golden-signals), if you can only measure four metrics of your user-facing system, focus on these four. + +This method is similar to the RED method, but it includes saturation. + +- **Latency -** Time taken to serve a request +- **Traffic -** How much demand is placed on your system +- **Errors -** Rate of requests that are failing +- **Saturation -** How "full" your system is diff --git a/docs/sources/getting-started/timeseries.md b/docs/sources/getting-started/timeseries.md index 93bce8fc4a1..739c034143b 100644 --- a/docs/sources/getting-started/timeseries.md +++ b/docs/sources/getting-started/timeseries.md @@ -3,8 +3,8 @@ title = "Time series" description = "Introduction to time series" keywords = ["grafana", "intro", "guide", "concepts", "timeseries"] type = "docs" -[menu.docs] aliases = ["/docs/grafana/latest/guides/timeseries"] +[menu.docs] name = "Time series" identifier = "time_series" parent = "guides" diff --git a/docs/sources/menu.yaml b/docs/sources/menu.yaml index e66b2fae2ba..a483e4c6a2c 100644 --- a/docs/sources/menu.yaml +++ b/docs/sources/menu.yaml @@ -9,6 +9,8 @@ link: /getting-started/timeseries/ - name: Intro to histograms link: /getting-started/intro-histograms/ + - name: Observability strategies + link: /getting-started/strategies/ - name: Glossary link: /getting-started/glossary/ - name: Installation