Tom Wilkie

Founder, Kausal

Tom is the founder of Kausal, a new company working on Prometheus & Cortex. Previously he worked at companies such as Weaveworks, Google, Acunu and XenSource. In his spare time, Tom likes to make craft beer and build home automation systems.

Talk Title: The RED Method: How to Instrument Your Services

The RED Method defines three key metrics you should measure for every microservice in your architecture; inspired by the USE Method from Brendan Gregg, it gives developers a template for instrumenting their services and building dashboards in a consistent, repeatable fashion.

In this talk, Tom Wilkie will discuss patterns of application instrumentation, where and when they are applicable, and how they can be implemented with Prometheus. He’ll cover Google’s Four Golden Signals, the RED Method, the USE Method, and Dye Testing. He’ll also discuss why consistency is an important approach for reducing cognitive load. Finally, he’ll talk about the limitations of these approaches and what can be done to overcome them.

Recent Talks

The RED Method: How to Instrument Your Services