Episode Details

In today's episode, Jeffrey is joined by Eric Hexter, the Chief Technology Officer of Quarterspot LASO — a fintech company that produces lending platforms using machine learning. He built the company in the Cloud with DevOps as a foundational component of delivering the product. Eric has filled roles as CTO, Chief Architect, Developer, and Consultant. He's spent most of his career working with web technologies, with a total of twenty years experience producing technology solutions that deliver business value.

As Jeffrey says, Eric is the DevOps King. He's done some incredible work over the past decade and a half and has even written some books — well, namely one book back in 2012, ASP.NET MVC 4 in Action, co-authored by Jeffrey as well.

Eric and Jeffrey talk all about DevOps Diagnostics today, running through the various categories within it, such as: system metrics, log files, air conditions, heartbeats, and data integrity checks. Eric also gives his recommendations to those new and experienced with the system — tools, resources, and services.

Topics of Discussion:

[:47] About today's guest, Eric Hexter.

[1:19] Jeffrey welcomes Eric to the podcast.

[2:28] How Eric first got interested in the world of DevOps.

[4:01] Eric talks about some of the key points made from his presentation on the Azure DevOps User Group on Meetup.

[6:46] What Cloud DevOps diagnostics consist of.

[8:10] What categories .NET developers need to be watching in order to operate their systems effectively.

[9:08] Eric talks about one of these categories: his favorite system metrics.

[12:15] Eric gives a quick rundown on queue-based processing.

[14:23] Eric's favorite queue at the moment.

[15:21] The importance of having metrics on every running piece of your application.

[18:23] A word from Azure DevOps sponsor: Clear Measure.

[18:52] How Eric looks at system metrics.

[20:06] On Eric's team, who looks at the metrics?

[20:34] Eric gives an explanation of the next category of Cloud DevOps diagnostics: log files.

[22:32] What Eric recommends developers should be logging to a text file.

[23:33] Eric explains what a decorator pattern looks like in code.

[24:42] Eric briefly explains built-in log files.

[25:03] How Eric brings all these log files together to cohesively view them all.

[26:31] How does Eric log files?

[27:30] Why logging as a first class feature within the application can be incredibly useful.

[29:14] The next category of Cloud DevOps diagnostics: air conditions and common patterns within it.

[38:13] The next category: heartbeats.

[42:00] Eric dives into the next diagnostics category: data integrity checks.

[44:04] The differences in structured logging compared to regular logging.

[48:46] For structured logging, does Eric have a favorite library?

[50:41] Eric's recommendations tools and services to get started in all of this.

[53:06] Eric's advice on how to consolidate all your flat files to start a consistent view.

[54:16] Eric's favorite heartbeat source.

[55:00] Additional resources Eric recommends listeners to go check out after this week's episode.

Mentioned in this Episode:

Quarterspot

ASP.NET MVC 4 in Action, by Eric Hexter, Jeffrey Palermo, Jimmy Bogard, Matthew Hinze, and Jeremy Skinner

Azure DevOps

Azure DevOps User Group on Meetup

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