LaunchDarkly: Monitoring & Observability while Testing in Production

Heavybit member company LaunchDarkly held another Test in Production Meetup in the Heavybit Clubhouse. On February 20th, the Testing in Production Meetup group focused on monitoring and observability. If you’d like to attend future sessions in person, sign up here.

Testing and Debugging in Production with Distributed Tracing

Priyanka Sharma, Product Marketing, Partnerships & Open Source at LightStep

Priyanka kicked off the event by discussing how software systems have become more complex in recent years, especially with the rise of CI/CD and microservices. “There’s an explosion of data. The more services there are, the more touchpoints there are, and the more data you have to collect about what’s happening in your system. It’s very hard to manage all of this.” She shows how distributed tracing can help teams get a better understanding of their systems and the responses they’re seeing.

Watch her talk to learn more about tracing as an essential tool for testing in production.

Instrumenting CI Pipelines

Clay Smith, Developer Advocate at New Relic

Clay Smith took a look at the three pillar approach—metrics, tracing, and logging. He wanted to explore what tracing looks like within a CI pipeline, and so he observed a single run of a build with multiple steps kicked off by a code commit.

“I wanted to try and apply some of this stuff to understanding AWS CodePipeline that I was using to build some Docker images. The question that I wanted to explore and kind of get into and try to learn more about observability by trying to build something is, if we take this really interesting ideas that were outlined in these posts and apply them to a CI tool, what can we learn and what does that actually look like?”

Watch his talk to learn more about his case study on AWS CodeBuild.

Tonight We Monitor, For Tomorrow, We Test in Production!

Steven Czerwinski, Head of Engineering at Scalyr

Steve Czerwinski presented a case study around latency issues a Scalyr customer recently faced. He shares how his colleague, John Hart, explored the issue, and then reviews some key learnings realized after the event.

“Monitoring is so important to testing in production. I want to evoke the idea that you need to get your monitoring in place before testing in production. If you’re not really monitoring, you’re not really testing—you’re just hoping that things go right.”

Watch his talk to learn why monitoring is key when testing in production.

Panel Q&A

After the individual talks, we assembled our speakers for a short Q&A led by Emily Nakashima. Watch this short panel below.

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