Introduction to Alibaba Monitoring System

We all know that monitoring is one of the most important topics in the field of devops, but sometimes we are also suffering from it, such as alarm storm and high cost of deployment. And in this talk, we will share how Alibaba deal with these problems.

In Alibaba, there are hundreds of major KPIs has been defined to measure the running status of the business. In our system, we have created a CMDB for the business monitoring, which is called as Hammurabi. This is used to record the business function points with their priority levels and stakeholders. We will map the business monitoring to this CMDB. Thus, when the alarm comes, we can quickly confirm the business impact based on the trend of business indicator and make an emergency response. Intelligent business monitoring method based on time series analysis has already been used in our business monitoring, which helped to improve the accuracy of alarms from the baseline of 20% to 80% recently.

A Case Study that include Taobao and Youku will be shared to show how the business monitoring contributes to the optimization of operations and business.