Merge pull request #556 from brian-brazil/compose

Add Compose interview

content/blog/2016-09-21-interview-with-compose.md

+---
+title: Interview with Compose
+created_at: 2016-09-21
+kind: article
+author_name: Brian Brazil
+---
+
+*Continuing our series of interviews with users of Prometheus, Compose talks
+about their monitoring journey from Graphite and InfluxDB to Prometheus.*
+
+
+## Can you tell us about yourself and what Compose does?
+
+[Compose](https://www.compose.com/) delivers production-ready database clusters
+as a service to developers around the world. An app developer can come to us
+and in a few clicks have a multi-host, highly available, automatically backed
+up and secure database ready in minutes. Those database deployments then
+autoscale up as demand increases so a developer can spend their time on
+building their great apps, not on running their database.
+
+We have tens of clusters of hosts across at least two regions in each of AWS,
+Google Cloud Platform and SoftLayer. Each cluster spans availability zones
+where supported and is home to around 1000 highly-available database
+deployments in their own private networks. More regions and providers are in
+the works.
+
+
+## What was your pre-Prometheus monitoring experience?
+
+Before Prometheus, a number of different metrics systems were tried. The first
+system we tried was [Graphite](https://graphiteapp.org/), which worked pretty
+well initially, but the sheer volume of different metrics we had to store,
+combined with the way Whisper files are stored and accessed on disk, quickly
+overloaded our systems. While we were aware that Graphite could be scaled
+horizontally relatively easily, it would have been an expensive cluster.
+[InfluxDB](https://www.influxdata.com/) looked more promising so we started
+trying out the early-ish versions of that and it seemed to work well for a good
+while. Goodbye Graphite. 
+
+The earlier versions of InfluxDB had some issues with data corruption
+occasionally. We semi-regularly had to purge all of our metrics. It wasn’t a
+devastating loss for us normally, but it was irritating. The continued promises
+of features that never materialised frankly wore on us.
+
+
+## Why did you decide to look at Prometheus?
+
+It seemed to combine better efficiency with simpler operations than other
+options.
+
+Pull-based metric gathering puzzled us at first, but we soon realised the
+benefits. Initially it seemed like it could be far too heavyweight to scale
+well in our environment where we often have several hundred containers with
+their own metrics on each host, but by combining it with Telegraf, we can
+arrange to have each host export metrics for all its containers (as well as its
+overall resource metrics) via a single Prometheus scrape target.
+
+
+## How did you transition?
+
+We are a Chef shop so we spun up a largish instance with a big EBS volume and
+then reached right for a [community chef
+cookbook](https://github.com/rayrod2030/chef-prometheus) for Prometheus.
+
+With Prometheus up on a host, we wrote a small Ruby script that uses the Chef
+API to query for all our hosts, and write out a Prometheus target config file.
+We use this file with a `file_sd_config` to ensure all hosts are discovered and
+scraped as soon as they register with Chef. Thanks to Prometheus’ open
+ecosystem, we were able to use Telegraf out of the box with a simple config to
+export host-level metrics directly.
+
+We were testing how far a single Prometheus would scale and waiting for it to
+fall over. It didn’t! In fact it handled the load of host-level metrics scraped
+every 15 seconds for around 450 hosts across our newer infrastructure with very
+little resource usage.
+
+We have a lot of containers on each host so we were expecting to have to start
+to shard Prometheus once we added all memory usage metrics from those too, but
+Prometheus just kept on going without any drama and still without getting too
+close to saturating its resources. We currently monitor over 400,000 distinct
+metrics every 15 seconds for around 40,000 containers on 450 hosts with a
+single m4.xlarge prometheus instance with 1TB of storage. You can see our host
+dashboard for this host below. Disk IO on the 1TB gp2 SSD EBS volume will
+probably be the limiting factor eventually. Our initial guess is well
+over-provisioned for now, but we are growing fast in both metrics gathered and
+hosts/containers to monitor.
+
+![Prometheus Host Dashboard](/assets/blog/2016-09-21/compose-host-dashboard.png)
+
+At this point the Prometheus server we’d thrown up to test with was vastly more
+reliable than the InfluxDB cluster we had doing the same job before, so we did
+some basic work to make it less of a single-point-of-failure. We added another
+identical node scraping all the same targets, then added a simple failover
+scheme with keepalived + DNS updates. This was now more highly available than
+our previous system so we switched our customer-facing graphs to use Prometheus
+and tore down the old system.
+
+
+![Prometheus-powered memory metrics for PostgresSQL containers in our app](/assets/blog/2016-09-21/compose-memory-stats.png)
+
+## What improvements have you seen since switching?
+
+Our previous monitoring setup was unreliable and difficult to manage. With
+Prometheus we have a system that’s working well for graphing lots of metrics,
+and we have team members suddenly excited about new ways to use it rather than
+wary of touching the metrics system we used before.
+
+The cluster is simpler too, with just two identical nodes. As we grow, we know
+we’ll have to shard the work across more Prometheus hosts and have considered a
+few ways to do this.
+
+## What do you think the future holds for Compose and Prometheus?
+
+Right now we have only replicated the metrics we already gathered in previous
+systems - basic memory usage for customer containers as well as host-level
+resource usage for our own operations. The next logical step is enabling the
+database teams to push metrics to the local Telegraf instance from inside the
+DB containers so we can record database-level stats too without increasing
+number of targets to scrape.
+
+We also have several other systems that we want to get into Prometheus to get
+better visibility. We run our apps on Mesos and have integrated basic Docker
+container metrics already, which is better than previously, but we also want to
+have more of the infrastructure components in the Mesos cluster recording to
+the central Prometheus so we can have centralised dashboards showing all
+elements of supporting system health from load balancers right down to app
+metrics.
+
+Eventually we will need to shard Prometheus. We already split customer
+deployments among many smaller clusters for a variety of reasons so the one
+logical option would be to move to a smaller Prometheus server (or a pair for
+redundancy) per cluster rather than a single global one.
+
+For most reporting needs this is not a big issue as we usually don’t need
+hosts/containers from different clusters in the same dashboard, but we may keep
+a small global cluster with much longer retention and just a modest number of
+down-sampled and aggregated metrics from each cluster’s Prometheus using
+Recording Rules.
+