Skip to main content

Developing an Exception monitoring system for your cluster

Lot of times developers want to know
1) How many exceptions are happening in a 100 node cluster
2) When I do a new release are the no of exceptions growing or decreasing
3) What are my top 5 exceptions in the app that I need to focus on
4) overall are there any nodes where some exception is happening a lot of times compared to other nodes.

Getting all this statistics is tricky as you have to parse logs and aggregate what not so all this is messy and time consuming. Also when nodes are added/removed from cluster you have to change the script.

Solution I came up was very simple
1) 90% of the time the exceptions are logged using logger so I overrode the logger.error method and would get first 100 chars out of exception stacktrace keep a counter in a static in memory hashmap.
2) Some exceptions that are never logged so I wrote a servlet filter to catch them in a top level filter and log them to logger that way it would be counted.
3) I wrote a quartz job at the end of the day to print all this information in memory to scribe.
4) Scibe logs from all app nodes are sent to scribe server(We use it for other purposes but I piggy backed on it). The logs are rolled once a day.
5) Wrote a python program that listens to scribe log file rollover at the end of day and combines exception counters from all nodes and generates a sweet report and mails it to developers.
6) Next goal is to add these statistics counters to graphite dashboard so we can trend them and get the 4 requirements I highlighted above.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Haproxy and tomcat JSESSIONID

One of the biggest problems I have been trying to solve at our startup is to put our tomcat nodes in HA mode. Right now if a customer comes, he lands on to a node and remains there forever. This has two major issues: 1) We have to overprovision each node with ability to handle worse case capacity. 2) If two or three high profile customers lands on to same node then we need to move them manually. 3) We need to cut over new nodes and we already have over 100+ nodes.  Its a pain managing these nodes and I waste lot of my time in chasing node specific issues. I loath when I know I have to chase this env issue. I really hate human intervention as if it were up to me I would just automate thing and just enjoy the fruits of automation and spend quality time on major issues rather than mundane task,call me lazy but thats a good quality. So Finally now I am at a stage where I can put nodes behing HAProxy in QA env. today we were testing the HA config and first problem I immediat...

Adding Jitter to cache layer

Thundering herd is an issue common to webapp that rely on heavy caching where if lots of items expire at the same time due to a server restart or temporal event, then suddenly lots of calls will go to database at same time. This can even bring down the database in extreme cases. I wont go into much detail but the app need to do two things solve this issue. 1) Add consistent hashing to cache layer : This way when a memcache server is added/removed from the pool, entire cache is not invalidated.  We use memcahe from both python and Java layer and I still have to find a consistent caching solution that is portable across both languages. hash_ring and spymemcached both use different points for server so need to read/test more. 2) Add a jitter to cache or randomise the expiry time: We expire long term cache  records every 8 hours after that key was added and short term cache expiry is 2 hours. As our customers usually comes to work in morning and access the cloud file server it ...

Spring 3.2 quartz 2.1 Jobs added with no trigger must be durable.

I am trying to enable HA on nodes and in that process I found that in a two test node setup a job that has a frequency of 10 sec was running into deadlock. So I tried upgrading from Quartz 1.8 to 2.1 by following the migration guide but I ran into an exception that says "Jobs added with no trigger must be durable.". After looking into spring and Quartz code I figured out that now Quartz is more strict and earlier the scheduler.addJob had a replace parameter which if passed to true would skip the durable check, in latest quartz this is fixed but spring hasnt caught up to this. So what do you do, well I jsut inherited the factory and set durability to true and use that public class DurableJobDetailFactoryBean extends JobDetailFactoryBean {     public DurableJobDetailFactoryBean() {         setDurability(true);     } } and used this instead of JobDetailFactoryBean in the spring bean definition     <bean i...