Monitoring the Unmeasureable

From system performance to application metrics, we continue to further our understanding of what to monitor, why, and how to present it appropriately to the various audiences who need to act on this information. Yet there are things across our environment that we agree we can't measure because they are unquantifiable. That doesn't mean that there is zero signal to be analyzed and monitored.

We can look at open source software that is in wide use, yet becomes stale and unusable after years due to the atrophy of maintainers keeping it up to date with security and integrations with other software, or implementation of new features that keep it useful. How do you measure the health of your current implemented software solutions so that you know when to start planning change, or committing intentional time to a project?

How do you know when the cost of Amazon's Relational Database Service is more costly than having in-house qualified DBAs?

How do you measure the value of sending your employees to one conference over another? How do you convey the value of going to one conference over another?

In this talk, I'll tackle these questions in addition to sharing other observations about monitoring within our environments with the goal of inspiring others to examine available signals, their impact, and the value of monitoring.