Metrics and operational awareness at Voxer

Note: written in August 2012 during my summer at Voxer. sky has been released as zag!

Please read the article on Voxer's no single point of failure architecture, as it explains how process rings work, and how Voxer's load balancing works.

What are the salient implementation features of our metrics solution?

Client side (on your app servers, which emit data)

Server side (on the skyservers which aggregate metrics data)

Persisting data

Viewing metrics and adding new ones

Why didn't we just use etsy's statsd and whisper and carbon?

Etsy wrote a library called statsd, which works with whisper (the backend) to record metrics data. There are a couple reasons we chose not to use these technologies.

If you'd like to read about Zag, our awesome graphing UI, please check out this article.

Thanks for reading!
David Trejo
@ddtrejo & DTrejo on github

David Trejo

Engineer at Chime & consultant. Past clients include Credit Karma, Aconex, Triplebyte, Neo, the Brown Computer Science Department, Voxer, Cloudera, and the Veteran's Benefits Administration.