Valentino Stoll
speaker
350 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Valentino Stoll’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Ruby Rogues podcast. I am your host today, Valentino Stoll, and we are joined by a very special guest today, John Gallagher. John, can you introduce yourself and tell everybody a little bit about yourself and why we had you on today?
Yeah, and thank you for all the joy you're bringing to people, I hope. You definitely picked the right language, Ruby. If you're not familiar with this podcast, Ruby is a very joyful experience personally. So it's very cool. I love... I've loved been digging into all of the observability talk that you have on joyful programming.
And it's kind of a very important topic that I feel is definitely kind of... overlooked if you're starting up um maybe you get some like you know bug alerting or something like that in place as like a standard but kind of anything performance monitoring wise is kind of like a oh no like something happened let's look into it now i feel like it's like the the typical uh
uh, flow of things, uh, as people start up. Um, do you want to just give us like a high level, like what is observability and why should we care? Uh, what, you know, we could drill into the details of it after.
dynamically and explore the space and come to some conclusions yeah i think that's a great overview uh and your uh your your debugging uh reminded me of the i had the lucky experience of uh running rails with uh ruby 1.87 and every once in a while you just had to like
give the server a little kick because it started to grow in memory size and just, you know, giving it a quick little flush, like reset things. And you're just like, oh, I guess that's how we're going to do it until we can get like some insight into what's happening. Right. And I think that's definitely underlines the importance of observability in general.
Like, you know, how do you get those insights to begin with? Yeah. And maybe that's a great starting point. Like where do you start like looking at it, like adding this insights, right? Like what's the, is there a modular approach you could take or is it more of like you should look at doing everything all at once kind of thing?
There's no vendor you could just like pay money to and like you get 100% observability.
Yeah, I love that. I love that analogy of identifying the use case in order to expose what to observe and where to insert, you know, all of these pieces that are missing or identify them really, right? Not to just insert them, but to identify them. I think that's very important.
I think in general is like trying to identify the actual use cases in order to know what you even want to capture to begin with, right? Like, yeah, we get to throw a wall of logs, right? at a resource like Kibana, and it's not very useful.
But once you start to abstract the ideas and use cases and how people are actually using the thing that you've built, you can definitely isolate what it is that you actually care about. And I think you're right. That is kind of the whole importance of observability.
is is identifying that use case and exposing what what you actually care about uh as far as all these things that are because i mean you know there's http logs there's like also all kinds of logs and information available that's just like emitting all the time like how do you know and identify you know which are really important uh and i i think it just depends right like
What are you yeah, what are you trying to capture? So it's a it's a great like stepwise way to just like start to figure that out. Right. Because, yeah, I guess depending on your role and depending on what, you know, your responsibilities are, that could change and that could be different. And your observability needs will change with that. So identifying that is probably most important, I think.
And I'm all also like, you know, let's not just add New Relic to every app that we deploy. Or, you know, is Bugsnag even needed for every app? Like, these are questions that I ask myself, too. Like, what value are you getting from all these auxiliary services that give you the observability into, like, just blanket things? Yeah.
At what point do you stop that kind of mentality and be like, every Rails app should at least be able to get insight into the logs so that you can see what the application is doing. How long do you capture that? What kind of time frame? Do you have any default standards where you're like, well, I know that I'm going to need to look at this at some point in the application cycle.
What are your defaults?
Yeah, you mentioned kind of some key pieces I always think of with observability in general, which is like separating the pieces into their own puzzle, right? Like we have logs, which are kind of just like our data. And then we have individual metrics that we're like snapshotting the logs for particular segments like traffic or number of people using it, like the number of jobs that are running.
And then there are traces, which we could dig into next, because I have a lot of love for all of the standards that are coming out of this with open tracing and things like that. I'd love to dig in there. But also like alerting, like, you know, how does anybody know that there's ever a problem?
Yeah, I mean, and I love, I love like thinking about it in these separate groups and categories, because I think it also helps to think about like the overarching theme, which is like getting insight, but also like, getting meaningful insight.
And like when you want really like the only the only reason anybody ever cares about observability anyway is like when something goes wrong or something is problematic that causes something to go wrong. And you want to either catch it early or, you know, try and remediate. And so like.
Showing 1–20 of 350 · page 1 of 18
Next →