eBay Community Lounge

10 Billion a Day, 100 Milliseconds Per: Monitoring Real Time Bidding at AdRoll

Brian Troutwine of Adroll will be joining us tonight. Adroll uses Erlang to power their high-speed, never-stop online advertising services. That's right, 10 billion transactions a day.

Brian's talk will provide motivation for the extensive instrumentation of complex computer systems and make the argument that such systems are essential. This talk will provide practical starting points in Erlang projects and maintain a perspective on the human organization around the computer system. Brian will focus on getting started with instrumentation in a systematic way and follow up with the challenge of interpreting and acting on metrics emitted from a production system in a way which does not overwhelm operators’ ability to effectively control or prioritize faults in the system. He’ll use historical examples and case studies from my work to keep the talk anchored in the practical.

Talk objectives:

Brian hopes to convince the audience of two things:

• monitoring and instrumentation is an essential component of any long-lived system and

• it's not so hard to get started, after all.

He’ll keep a clear-eyed view of what works and is difficult in practice so that the audience can make a reasoned decision after the talk.