The Many Ways Your Monitoring Is Lying to You

Monitoring and dashboarding systems are crucial to understanding the behavior of large distributed systems. But monitoring systems can lead you on wild goose chases, or hide issues. In this talk, I will look at some examples of how a monitoring system can lie to you – in order to sensitize the audience to these failure modes and encourage them to look for similar examples in their own systems.

Sebastian Kirsch is a Site Reliability Engineer for Google in Zürich, Switzerland. He manages the team that runs Google Calendar. Sebastian joined Google in 2006 in Dublin, Ireland, and has worked both on internal systems like Google's web crawler, as well as on external products like Google Maps. He specializes in the reliability aspects of new Google products and new features of existing products, ensuring that they meet the same high reliability bar as every other Google service.