10. All About SAM: System Alerting & Monitoring (Luca Ravazzolo)

Speaker 0 00:00:02 Welcome to data points, a podcast by InterSystems learning services. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast. App links can be [email protected] I'm Derek Robinson. And on today's episode, I'll welcome back to the podcast. Luca Ravin, Zola product manager for cloud and containers here at InterSystems to talk about systems alerting and monitoring in InterSystems Iris. <inaudible> welcome to episode 10 of data points by InterSystems learning services. Before we get started, I wanted to give a quick reminder to subscribe to the podcast, using the [email protected]. You can find links for Apple, Spotify, Google, and Stitcher there. I also wanted to mention that the developer community community.intersystems.com is the place to interact with us about future topics for the podcast. I typically post every episode as a developer community post, and you can feel free to leave comments on those posts. I might also make a discussion post at some point, asking for more ideas to try to give our listeners a chance to submit topics they would like to see covered. So feel free to join the conversation back to the episode I'm joined today by Luca raviolo. You might remember Luca from episode two of data points where we covered Kubernetes today. Luca is telling us all about systems alerting and monitoring Sam for short, which is a new component of InterSystems, Iris that you can try out. Speaker 0 00:01:39 All right. And welcome back to the podcast. Luca rev is also joining us for the first time, since way back on episode two, I think it was of data points, Luca, how's it going Speaker 1 00:01:47 Very well, Derek, thank you very much. Yeah, it was early days and podcasts from them, right? Speaker 0 00:01:53 Yeah, yeah, exactly. You're you were one of the first three guests we had, I think in that initial launch, which, uh, generated a lot of excitement around it and I think people are still enjoying the podcast episodes and, uh, we're happy to have you back. So, uh, so Luke, I know that, uh, one of your areas of expertise here at InterSystems is cloud and containers technology. Um, and so the, what we're going to talk about today is related in some ways, but also a little bit into the system administration area, and that is, uh, Sam or a systems alerting and monitoring. So Luca, can you tell us first for the audience, what is Sam and, you know, as we've mentioned offline, it's coming out very soon for InterSystems users. Speaker 1 00:02:29 Yes, absolutely. Yeah. We are counting the hours. Um, so, um, hopefully everybody can, uh, can start playing with Sam within the preview, uh, that will be launching soon. Um, so system alert in a monitoring or as we call it a more friendly in a friendly way, Sam for sure is just a simplified way of monitoring your inter systems, RS clusters. And we wanted to make it very simple. That is really is the main objectives. And you know, the, for that is because we are a painfully aware that there are many sites and installation around the world where people don't have time. They don't have resources to, to either, you know, provision and work with a commercial solution or with an open source solution that you need to cobble together and make sure that you stands up and it works and is fault-tolerant and all that, uh, to monitor our systems. So, so we said, you know, uh, this is a, we need, we need to, we need to end that era. Everybody needs to be able to monitor their system and not call the WRC, not, not call support because they have a moment of downtime because they forgot. They know if they're there, they run out of storage space, you know, uh, people should be really, you know, followed up so they can have, you know, uh, alerting and monitoring. And this is where some is foreign. It's very, very simple to set up and run. Speaker 0 00:03:53 So I think we'll get to a little bit of what makes Sam so easy in comparison to some of those complex setups that people could have for their monitoring and alerting, but for starting the conversation with some existing InterSystems users, maybe the people that have been using InterSystems cache ensemble, and now Iris Iris for health for a long time, how does Sam differ from what was already available and InterSystems Iris, both as far as functionality and then kind of transitioning into, like you said, maybe the bigger part, which is how easy it is. Speaker 1 00:04:22 Yeah. Well, it's very different. And the reason for that is that basically you're going to have a UI, a web-based user interface that graphically shows you the metrics and what they're doing. Um, so, and this doesn't mean that, you know, annual the tools that people are already using now, any, any of the, uh, the libraries that we have within InterSystems, RS are being taken out. Not everything stays exactly the same. We just added this capability, uh, so that if you've got something that you built on, those tools carry on and that's fine. And, um, and the main difference is that, you know, we have all those metrics inside our current, on Sada, inside our engine. And, you know, they're very, very powerful. We have all kind of metrics, but the problem is how do I externalize those metrics now to visualize over a time series, uh, you know, stretch off a screen to understand a trend, for example, and that's always been the problem, you know, you have to externalize them, then there, maybe you point Excel to that, or some other tool, we do some massaging of the data, but you know, all of that takes time and effort, and we want it to be a lot more intuitive and easy. Speaker 1 00:05:29 And thus what some EHRs is very different because it offers you a UI that, uh, very easily connects to InterSystems RS on the backend Speaker 0 00:05:40 For someone who is using a bunch of third-party tools, or maybe they have, they have a setup right now that they use for monitoring for reporting. And the way I kind of think of it is that it's complex enough that the next person would need to be trained pretty heavily to figure out how to use all this stuff they have connected. Right. How does Sam make that easier for those people that have these kind of existing setups and then maybe what are some of the details and the reasons behind why it's simpler? Speaker 1 00:06:04 Yes. So we've used Sam, a systematic at monitoring as an appliance. So you just take it the way it's configured and now we'll go into the details and you just run it. And as you run it, it has a series of components that, that, that he puts together and make sure, you know, they work configure and basically your job as somebody that wants to monitor a cluster of RS instances, you know, we either would many nodes or many sharp nodes there is just to tell Sam where those end point on the backend are. All you need is just an IP address and a port and a socket to define where, where, you know, we're going to pick up those metrics and that's it. Right? So from an external point of view, you know, it's really that simple. You, you run it up, we do all the configuration of the different components that go into that in a second. Speaker 1 00:06:57 And you just tell some where your artist's instances are, that's it. And then, and then start enjoying yourself in terms of, you know, looking at what the metrics say and drilling down into the single instance from a cluster level, point of view, to see how your instance is doing on the backend and it's graphical and intuitive. And that's it very, very easy, right? So, um, going into the details of this appliance that we just run up and he does everything right. So, um, first of all, is based on containers technology. And, uh, we leverage some open source technology that's out there probably best of breeds in, in their individual fields. And, uh, we offer this as a Docker compose the finisher. So Docker compose, uh, is just as a small engine that reads a Yammer definition within that Jamar definition or the components that we have, uh, there is first of all, what we call a Sam manager. Speaker 1 00:07:57 So it's, it's an Iris instance that deals with a lot of complexity and managing and configuration files, for example, and talking to this other components. And then we have, uh, promoters from Luther's as a, you know, a leading a cloud native computing foundation, you know, promoted project that basically you can find it in any cloud and any Kubernetes engine that runs out there to monitor the platform. So we leverage that as well, just because it's, it does a very good job at it, right? So we're leveraging that because it's very good metrics. And then for the graphical part, for the more graphical, apart from the single in our metrics, we leverage Grafana, uh, again, uh, probably, uh, one of the best, you know, metric visualizer out there, again, very, very well-known and users don't have to be expert in any of this thing, which has configured them at the Docker compose, as you do, you know, Docker compose up in a run up, it runs up all these containers configured, and you don't have to do anything. Speaker 1 00:08:58 Now, if you are an expert or if you're already using, you know, premieres and refining and other things that you can go in, and of course, tune it to a, to a heart's desire and really know, do exactly what you want, but even without knowing them, you can appreciate all of a sudden, you know, you have a very powerful, uh, you know, solution in your hands that allows you to really, uh, graphically see what's happening. Um, you know, in your own, your hardest instances. However, I would like to underline another fact that if you just read only metrics from, from an instance, uh, you only have a partial picture of what's happening out there. And that's why the name of the product is system alerting and monitoring. So we monitor metrics, we can show you the metrics, but we also shows you the alerts that come from the backends. Speaker 1 00:09:47 And why is that? Well, because, you know, if I ask you, well, what does that mean? That that particular system is running our 85% CPU? Um, is that a problem or is that okay? Maybe it's black Friday and you are very happy because, you know, you're becoming rich because there's a lot of orders coming through your website, right? And so the point here is that if that 85% is not accompanied by any alerting, then it's probably good. You know, you can maybe go and have a look at the global references and maybe you can also piggyback, and this is another nice things about some, your application monitoring on the same infrastructure. So you understand, you'll be able to see, Oh, these are effective transactions happening on my system. So that is a good CPU peak that I see if on the other end, I see an 85, 90% CPU peak. Speaker 1 00:10:35 And I also see, for example, some are, uh, IO latency on the desk, and also not alert coming through saying that maybe, you know, uh, there is some bright problems on one of the storage system that I have. Then I know that, you know, something is looping there or something's stuck. And, uh, you know, that system need attention SAP. And so by combining, you know, alerts strings and, and, and metrics we're able to offer you, you know, a picture, uh, still a partial picture, but it's a more comprehensive picture of what's happening, uh, for you to understand, you know, and, and maybe act on it. And I think that adds a lot, a lot of value. And as I said, you can also piggy back on the semi infrastructure, uh, the, the applicant, your application specific metrics that you might want to count. Speaker 0 00:11:24 Yeah, it's, it sounds like there's a lot going on there. And I think, um, one of the things that jumped out to me earlier in that answer was, uh, and I think I might've seen this in some other materials on sandwiches. That it's one way you could describe it is that it does native, but it's open. And it's a really good combination of that. Um, for, you know, that I think hits a wide spectrum of audience that, like you said, may be expert in these other technologies that are connected or may not be, and just really need a simpler way to access the performance of their system and the essential things that they need to see about how their applications and their systems are performing. Um, it sounds like a really, really useful tool for them. Yeah. Speaker 1 00:11:59 Right. And like an underlining, what you just said in terms of, you know, the open and the native, uh, nature of the standard solution. So is native in the sense that it's InterSystems native solution, you take that appliance, you run it, you know, and you're off, you know, monitoring your systems, but, but it's open in terms of the open source technology that we're leveraging. So for example, if the user, even if it's not an expert says, yeah, okay. I appreciate the default template that you given me intersystem for the, for some of these metrics, but I would like to see, you know, uh, display of these other two metrics, for example. And I would like to, to, to, to be displayed with a different type of charts, right. Well then, you know, you don't even have to call us, you can go on the internet and Google, you know, gonna find out a chart, Y Z you like, you know, how do I set it up and just to be yourself, it's just all there. Um, so there's so much support, so much availability, you know, we're going to find those just come out. Uh, two days ago, the new version version seven, I believe, you know, so much that there's really, so the community is really working hard. And, um, I think that, you know, that there are really fantastic tools that, and, you know, by leveraging them, we offered the best of both worlds. Speaker 0 00:13:06 Yeah, absolutely. That sounds great. So moving to one more question before we kind of get to the last part about how people can try this out, what types of roles, as far as the people that are interacting with these systems at a, at a typical organization, potentially, um, what types of roles are, is Sam going to be most beneficial for and provide the most, you know, kind of new advantages for, and what are some of the examples in how those people will benefit from using the same product? Speaker 1 00:13:31 Yeah. Good question. Yeah. Thank you. So originally the idea was that, you know, when you monitor system, you have this image of this black room, uh, we call it the NOC rooms where you have this massive screens up on the wall, and you've got, you know, a few rows of chairs and this expert that keeps, you know, looking at this big screens, right. Um, and that's, you know, the knocker room operator, right. And those rooms, you can't even walk in sometime, you know, they've really like, you know, it's, uh, they're very segregated on this particular user can go in there because, you know, you can also drill down into data, et cetera, et cetera. So that's one type of user, and those, those users usually have, you know, various sophisticated, uh, products. Uh, Virta usually commercial products. And this brings me to, uh, to another underlying factor of the native plus open that, uh, every inter systems, Aras, uh, instance from, uh, 2019 dot four, um, actually has an inherent at a built in per meters exporter. Speaker 1 00:14:32 What does that mean? It means that, uh, you can just, uh, point your, your tooling might be a commercial tool and open stores to a cloud monitoring tool. Uh, the, most of them support the primitives format because it's very simple and they can monitor Iris systems. And this is, this is very, very important. And also consider that you don't have to go and find the exporter, uh, download install, equal figure that is built into each RSA instance. So this is very powerful. So for the NOC room operators, they can use what they have, or they can install Sam and 200 to down to their liking because there's, <inaudible> in there. But having said all that, I remember that in the new world of dev ops, where, you know, there is, uh, there are, there are accelerated development pressure and Springs in agile methodology as well. We have one to improve further the CIC de provision provision in pipelines. Speaker 1 00:15:27 You know, everybody wants to know how it work. So if I'm a dev ops manager and I have a couple of teams, right, that, that are running with building a couple of microservices or a couple of, you know, new add-ons to a, to an old monolithic solution, uh, I want to make sure that from the moment they check in code to the moment that gets built and start, you know, in a, in a quality assurance, uh, you know, testing phase to a pre-production to UAT, uh, all the way to production every invoice, I want to be able to monitor every single environment. Now, really one single installation of Sam. I can define multiple clusters and SOC can view multiple, multiple cluster instances. Now they are doing so this is very powerful, too. And to underline again, the, uh, the, the type of user that they can leverage some well in, within the Sam solution, their appliance will also have an alert manager. And so, uh, we can have, you know, a system administrators being paged or messages and alerts can be sent to a Slack channels, et cetera, et cetera. And so, you know, all kinds of users can benefit from an installation of Sam. Speaker 0 00:16:36 Nice. So that's a good overview of kind of those, those key areas and where they can draw the most value from this product. So I think a lot of people listening might fall into one of those boats that you just described. So how can people try it out and learn more about Sam, which as we mentioned is by the time you're listening to this may already be available to try. Speaker 1 00:16:53 Yes. So, um, I think that, yeah, the, by the time you were up at the Zappa and clean, clean, my English here, everybody should be, should be able to pull us. So we have the same manager, which is built on ours will be a, uh, a container available from Docker hub. So it will be, uh, with a community edition, uh, uh, built-in license. And then with that, you will, you will need also a few configuration file. So there's a Docker compose that a Yamhill definition, a few configuration files of parameters for finer alerted manager, et cetera, and engine X. And those you'll be able to find them in a guitarp slash inter system, Dutch communities, lash Sam. So now you can just download this few files would be providing a, it was more tolerable. And with that, just, just run the Docker, Docker up, everything will be described in there, what you have to do, and all the containers will be pulled automatically from Docker hub anyway. So you don't have to worry about Speaker 0 00:17:51 Nice. Well, that seems like a very easy way forward and a great way for people to try it. And we'll make sure we include the links to those resources in the podcast episode description as well, to make it easier for everyone listening to go try it out and get in touch if you'd like to explore more. So Luca is thank you so much for joining us and we'll see you next time. Thank you. Derek has been a pleasure take care of him. Speaker 2 00:18:09 <inaudible> Speaker 0 00:18:14 Thanks again to Luca for the insight about Sam, as we mentioned, Sam is being released right around the time of this podcast episode. So if there aren't any links yet in the podcast description, keep checking back for those as soon as it's released and you can try it out for yourself, we'll be sure to update the links in the podcast description. That'll do it for episode 10 and we'll see you next time on data points. Speaker 2 00:18:34 <inaudible>.