Major system issues that affect the reliability of our services are detected and mitigated quickly. However, there are several minor issues that take a longer time to detect and mitigate. Such minor issues can collectively result in poor user experiences and revenue loss over time. This is where uVitals comes in, as it surfaces these issues and anomalies when they begin to occur.
A great blog post from the Uber Engineering Team where they discuss their anomaly detection & alerting system called uVitals.
Blog posts like this show you just how much work goes into keeping these apps we take for granted chugging along.
If you tried to read this from top to bottom in one go, you’d probably suffer a case of “Information Overload” and that is to be expected. I have no insider knowledge on this, but if I had to guess, I’d say it took a lot of engineers (read 10+) a lot of time (read 1+ years) to get it to the point where they felt comfortable doing a write-up.
Another thing that could be misleading is assuming that the version presented in this post is even close to what the first version was. Projects like this start out very simply and have a very basic pipeline and then they go through countless iterations using feedback loops where new features are added and current features are improved.
The result is the robust system presented above.
So the next time you want to build something, start out very simple and iterate. Don’t worry about it being too simple to begin with. As you add features and fix bugs, complexity will abound and you will yearn for the simpler days.
Thanks for reading and as always, all comments, critiques and questions are highly appreciated. Here's a link to the
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