Instrumentation is a critical part of any application. Along with system counters like cpu, heap, free disk, etc-- it's important to create application-level metrics to make sure health is measured closer to your customer's experience.

Example metrics could be user-registration, password-change, profile-change, etc. If you see a major spike or dip in these metrics, a wider problem could be indicated.

For this example a custom metric was needed, and no infrastructure was in place for harvesting it (e.g. collectd). Golang is handy for creating an easy-to-install daemon which performs the measurement and periodically harvests the data into stackdriver.

The …

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