Ask HN: ratio of unit/functional tests to monitoring checks

9 pointsgarethr14y ago4 comments

I'd writing a talk on web application monitoring and if people have a moment I'd love some data to use in that talk.

For your currently live project/team/organisation/whatever what is the ratio of unit, functional, integration tests to checks in your monitoring system?

For instance in a recent project (medium sized rails stack) we have ~2000 tests to about 240 checks in Nagios.

Any data points would be interesting. Anonymous data is fine.

4 comments

4 comments · 3 top-level

viraptor14y ago· 1 in thread

I'm surprised at that amount of active checks for a web app. What are you checking really - things like responsiveness, or more correctness? And do you include only the webapp checks, or also the underlaying system.

I'd expect somewhere around 20-40 checks for the system itself, so it looks like a reasonable number for a single app/deployment. Then again, I'm a passive monitoring fanboy.

garethrOP14y ago

Actually I think active is probably the wrong word, so changed in the post, but to answer your question:

It's a system based on multiple web services and run across multiple hosts, and I've included all system checks in that number. So we have checks for:

* ping, ssh, disk, load, network io, etc. * error rates from request logs * request rates (warning on high values) * smoke tests for key functionality (i.e. does the search engine return results, can you complete certain forms, etc.) * connection tests from relevant hosts to relevant services or databases

lamby14y ago

~300 unit tests across all site components.

145 nagios checks, including some smoke tests.

chris_wot14y ago

I'm not really familiar with Nagios. What sort of active monitoring checks do you have that you use? I'd be interested :-)

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