Currently I’m using the logging setup of Beaver shipping logs into an ELK stack, and metrics with collectd shipping metrics into a Graphite stack. Now that Elastic have Beats that do both logging and metrics, its worth exploring further.

Just as you start off on a Monday morning, at 9:01am, there’s a page, that crucial, heavily used site is broken, users are blocked from working and frustrated. What went wrong?

One of the main pressures around response to incidents is simply being overwhelmed with tasks, the outcome of so many demands and so much context-switching can easily be chaos, or poor quality quick-fixes. As with all real-time response, the key thing is to take a step-back, and triage the incoming requests as they arrive, prioritising those we need to deal with first, and deferring those that we can tackle later.