Twitter Presents on Metrics and Monitoring

I am down in SJ on my now regular visit. Velocity 90 conference just occurred, but I was not able to attend.

The great thing about a conference like Velocity you can get to much of the content on their web site. I am going through a bunch of them, and the Twitter presentation by John Adams triggered some thoughts.

After going through the presentation I found it interesting that data centers are not built to Twitter’s requirements which is a boon  for the collocation companies. Twitter uses AT&T hosting services.

Can data centers be built for companies like Twitter?  Or do collocation companies need to be building different type of facilities for this market?

It was quite refreshing to see an operations team who gets what it takes to green its  operations.  John says nothing about being “Green” in his presentation, but in his passion for performance he is being green.

Here is the full video of the twitter presentation.

Slides that caught my attention for the data center crowd are below.

It is typical that IT Operations doesn’t deal with the physical plant.

And, Twitter figured out clouds don’t work for them as performance and latency is a top issue.

They use closed loop feedbacks.

Prioritize the issues by finding weak points.

Have metrics as a priority.

Present the data with dashboards and admit to data porn.

Then turn the data into actionable information.

The Intel gang must be doing a little jig when they saw this slide about efficiency, and how to people can green their data center with Intel Nehalem.

And makes an excellent point on disk in their scenario.

And provide transparency on the status of the site.  This would be great to have a PUE Status for those who claim record PUE numbers.