o11y

I want to introduce one of the most powerful techniques in our arsenal when supporting production systems: system call tracing. But first: what is a system call?

Simply put, system calls are how programs interact with the operating system to request and manage resources like memory, files, network sockets, and hardware devices.

System call tracing allows you to observe the behavior of running processes and how they use those resources in real time.

Why is...

When running a production system, one of the main responsibilities is being able to respond when things go wrong. This is especially important for newly-launched or rapidly-changing systems where incidents are guaranteed, usually due to defect leakage or performance/scaling challenges.

Incident readiness typically involves the following capabilities:

• Monitoring (a computer is aware of your system’s health)
• An escalation path (when monitoring doesn’t work)
• Alerting (how to notify when something breaks)
• An on-call rotation (who...

There are many articles online about Service Level Objectives(SLOs), particularly on the value they provide to customers as part of a Service Level Agreement(SLA).

Let’s discuss some of the benefits of SLOs that aren’t apparent at first glance.

Before we do, let’s quickly review the terminology from the source:

• SLI: a service level indicator—a carefully defined quantitative measure of some aspect of the level of service that is provided.
• SLO: is a service...