A wonderful read on metrics, profiling, benchmarking

Brendan Gregg’s writings are always interesting and informative. I just saw a link on hacker news to a presentation he gave on “Broken Performance Tools”. It is wonderful, and succinctly explains many thing I’ve talked about here and elsewhere, but it goes far beyond what I’ve grumbled over. One of my favorite points in there is slide 83. “Most popular benchmarks are flawed” and a pointer to a paper (easy to google for). This, honestly, should be required reading for anyone looking at the performance analysis side of devops. But most striking to me is slide 114, which I’ve discussed a corollary to in the past, the principle of maximum competence. Find the folks whom are smart enough to help you figure something out. Blame their bits. Watch them get all agitated and defensive, so that they are on a mission to find and solve that problem. Let them solve it. Iterate. We’ve experienced that quite a bit. Also, Brendan’s graphics are wonderful. Look at slide 120. Slide 121 needs to be made visible to … laser engraved mebbe? … onto the brains of all the good folks that want to pull thousands of “metrics” per system, across thousands of systems, into a database for analysis/detection/.. Highly recommended reading.