Blog

An Alternate Use Case For Prometheus Monitoring

Published: April 8, 2016

Tags:

I first heard about Prometheus on an episode of The Changelog Podcast. Before tuning in, I read the description and was intrigued. Monitoring is an important part of my day job where my team is responsible for ensuring the technical end of operations runs smoothly for many large scale ecommerce businesses. I saw that the episode featured an engineer from SoundCloud (a service I use regularly for streaming music) and decided to give it a spin.

Scaling Throughput to Magento’s Search Results Page

Published: April 7, 2016

In my work at Something Digital I’ve recently taken a deep dive into profiling and improving performance, at scale, of the search results page (/catalogsearch/result/index). In our case, we have a client whose traffic profile is very search heavy, and ran into performance issues due to a traffic sure to that route. The investigation was very interesting, and I thought it would be beneficial to document some of the key findings here.

Enterprise_Targetrule Database Structure

Published: August 15, 2015

Tags:

Recently, I've been doing some work with Magento Enterprise's "Rule-Based Product Relations" feature, or, as it's called in the source code, Enterprise_Targetrule.

At Something Digital we have a client with an interesting requirement that involved some customization to the module. As a result, I spent some time digging into the module's mechanics. Since technical documentation is sparse, I figured I'd share my learnings for anyone interested to benefit.

Whodunnit

Published: July 2, 2015

Tags:

When a team of people, both technical and non-technical, collectively operate a shared software installation things are bound to go wrong at some point. As the technical folk we are often engaged to perform forensic analysis. This type of work frequently includes tasks such as grep-ping server access logs for certain request paths, dates, and IP addresses or reviewing any other logs or information related to whatever incident may have occurred.

This post is about a specific incident that came up recently. It was not a major one, but there were some learnings for me along the way and I figured it would be interesting to document the process.

pv: My New Favorite Command

Published: June 30, 2015

Tags:

I don't know about you, but I'm not a fan of typing a command into the terminal and then nothing happening. Generally, any command that I know might take a while I'll run in verbose mode. That's great, I know that the process really is running. But what I don't know how far along it is...and how much more there is to go.

Today I found out about the pv command. Boy, is that a game changer...

Screenshot Monitoring

Published: May 2, 2015

Sometimes it's helpful to keep a visual record of certain areas of your website.

I'll give you an example. I worked on a Magento site with a long-standing issue where multiple times a day, half of the documents would fall out of the SOLR index. In the end we found the culprit behind this issue, but in the process of debugging and analyzing the issue it was helpful to keep screenshots of certain search terms on record. In this post I'll dive into the details on setting said monitoring up.