[gatehouse]

Similar to what Steve Yegge said in his unintentionally published platforms rant:

- monitoring and QA are the same thing. You'd never think so until you try doing a big SOA. But when your service says "oh yes, I'm fine", it may well be the case that the only thing still functioning in the server is the little component that knows how to say "I'm fine, roger roger, over and out" in a cheery droid voice. In order to tell whether the service is actually responding, you have to make individual calls. The problem continues recursively until your monitoring is doing comprehensive semantics checking of your entire range of services and data, at which point it's indistinguishable from automated QA. So they're a continuum.

https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX

[swah]

This was a great rant and I wish I could have access to all those "learnings". Are there any books or blog posts with that knowledge already? The best resource I know are Martin Fowler's posts on the subject...

[gatehouse]

I'm not aware of anything really in-depth.

There is one paper I like about operational issues in general: https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/lisa07/tech/full_papers/... . It lists a lot of criteria that must be met for a system to be highly automated.