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System Monitoring

Organic monitors all hosted sites for uptime, performance, and other metrics via various monitoring tools.

System monitoring serves as the overarching framework that unifies various critical monitoring practices, including Availability Monitoring, Infrastructure Monitoring, Application Performance Monitoring (APM), Error Monitoring, and Custom Monitoring.

This comprehensive approach involves the continuous observation and analysis of Organic's components, functionalities, and performance metrics. By integrating these specialized monitoring facets, we're able to ensure the seamless operation, optimal performance, and reliability of sites on Organic CMS.

System monitoring provides a holistic view, allowing for the proactive identification and resolution of issues, ultimately enhancing the overall efficiency and resilience of the entire system. This inclusive strategy is essential for maintaining a healthy digital ecosystem, where each monitoring aspect contributes to the collective goal of delivering a robust and error-free user experience for clients & their audiences.

For site-specific questions, please contact Organic Support.

Availability Monitoring​

Organic maintains more than 99.99% uptime for all hosted sites. We use Pingdom to monitor uptime for all production sites, focusing on homepages, sitemap pages, and other critical pages.

Pingdom​

Pingdom sends health check requests every minute to monitored URLs, then waits 30 seconds for a response of 200 OK. If this response is not received, Pingdom sends a notification to PagerDuty.

PagerDuty​

PagerDuty will immediately contact an on-call Organic engineer via phone call, text message, and push notification as soon as an outage is reported by Pingdom. If not immediately acknowledged, the alert is escalated to a backup engineer. There are always at least two engineers on-call to support urgent uptime issues for each site.

PagerDuty also alerts the broader Organic engineers and product managers via a monitored Slack channel any time there is a site outage.

Infrastructure Monitoring​

For cloud-based services, Infrastructure Monitoring is crucial for keeping systems running smoothly. It involves keeping an eye on key metrics like CPU usage, memory, and storage space to catch any potential problems early on. By setting thresholds and using alerts, Infrastructure Monitoring helps Organic quickly spot and address any issues, ensuring our systems stay reliable and efficient.

Amazon CloudWatch​

Organic uses Amazon CloudWatch alarms to monitor critical Amazon Web Service resources like Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Amazon ElastiCache, and Amazon Simple Email Service (SES).

If any metric surpasses a specified threshold, Amazon CloudWatch notifies Organic engineers and product managers via a monitored Slack channel for investigation.

Some commonly monitored metrics include:

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)​

  • CPU usage
  • IOPS Burst Balance
  • Available storage space

Amazon ElastiCache​

  • Memory usage
  • Current number of items in cache

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)​

  • Bounce Rate
  • Complaint Rate

Application Performance Monitoring (APM)​

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) is a vital practice in software management where we focus on maintaining the health and efficiency of various aspects within our applications. By proactively monitoring application performance, Organic ensures that all sites meet strict performance standards. By leveraging APM tools for monitoring and analysis, Organic can identify and address issues related to application performance swiftly, optimizing the user experience and overall functionality of our software systems.

Datadog​

Organic uses Datadog for APM and infrastructure monitoring. The Datadog agent is installed on every Amazon EC2 host on staging and production Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) clusters. Datadog packages are installed at a code level to track application performance like database queries, code-level calls latency, requests to third-party services, dependencies, and other health metrics. It collects the infrastructure data about CPU, memory, and available disk space for every host.

Organic monitors for the following scenarios:

Amazon EC2:​

  • High CPU usage
  • Low available disk space
  • Out-of-memory (OOM) events

Application Alerts​

  • Impressions per AdUnit anomalies (Organic Ads customers)
  • Impressions per Site anomalies (Organic Ads customers)

Error Monitoring​

Error monitoring is a critical aspect of managing software and site health, focusing specifically on tracking and addressing errors within applications. For websites that experience significant volumes of traffic, error monitoring becomes even more crucial. In an environment with high volumes of visitors, the likelihood of encountering errors increases. Error monitoring tools allow organizations like Organic to swiftly detect, diagnose, and resolve errors, preventing potential disruptions to the user experience.

Sentry​

Organic uses Sentry to track application errors for hosted sites. Sentry packages are installed on a code level and send error details to the Sentry dashboard. If any error fits the specified alerts rules, Organic engineers and product managers are notified via a monitored Slack channel for investigation.

Errors contain log information and additional context to assist in quickly identifying and troubleshooting errors.

Custom Monitoring​

Organic maintains its own tools to monitor other critical site functionality, including:

Robots.txt​

If changes are made to robots.txt files, a PagerDuty alert is sent to the on-call Organic engineer.

Kubernetes CronJobs​

Organic tracks Kubernetes CronJobs in production and staging clusters. An alert is sent to Organic engineers within five minutes of any job failure.

Post Modifications​

If any post's publish date is modified programmatically, an alert will be sent to the Organic engineering team via Slack. Changing a post's publish date may have unexpected SEO impacts to search ranking.