#southerncalifornialinuxexpo — Public Fediverse posts

BREAKING: Talk accepted for SCaLE 23x!

"Congratulations! We are excited to share that we have accepted your submission "Metrics As Music: an Open Source Symphony" for the SCaLE 23x program in the Observability track."

< happy gir dance >

#SRE #Observability #SCaLE #SCaLEx23 #SouthernCaliforniaLinuxExpo

SCaLE x23 talk submitted! Abstract below in case anyone is interested, let's hope my homies over at SCaLE are!

(I actually think this is the most SCaLE-aligned talk I've done yet, hoping for the best)

#SRE #Observability #SCaLEx23 #SouthernCaliforniaLinuxExpo

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## Title

**Metrics As Music: an Open Source Symphony**

## Short Abstract

Some have dreamed of the day where we can plug our complex systems into stereo speakers and know when there's trouble just by listening to the result. **Monteverdi** is a new Open Source platform that rethinks Observability and gets us closer to the dream.

This talk is a tour of application features, the pattern matching algorithm, a modular Plugin system that enables MIDI output, the TDD-based approach in Golang, and a look at its own metrics in OpenTelemetry. Along the way we dig into technical details like using GitHub Actions with GoReleaser to publish separate objects, or how it can be extended with Plugins to employ AI. The app will be displayed live and demoed, making sound through a MIDI device and DIY setup, using live system metrics to power the music.

## Long Abstract

Russell Ackoff once stated "a system is never the sum of its parts; it’s the product of their interaction." This describes the area of **Observability** where **Monteverdi** is pointed, exploring how to display relationships and interactions between different parts of the whole system at once. Metrics become pulses and events are streamed in real-time to show harmonic convergence, even as **audible sound**.

This open-source app written in **Golang** detects accents on continuous streams of changing values taken from different endpoints. It was originally grown as a Terminal UI to test how a particular kind of analysis taken from another discipline could work in software Observability. After a successful proof-of-concept, it evolved into a web UI using **D3.js** for presenting the data as visual pulses around concentric rings.

It needed more capability to deal with complicated data, but instead of working that into the API, it was extended with a **Plugin interface**. Adapters include Inputs that can calculate rates or read JSON, and Outputs that can write to a local database or play **MIDI**.

The talk features this evolution. We will learn about Monteverdi's conception and how it matured into solidly performant code. We dive into how an **LLM** was used for help in specific areas like logging analysis and debugging, testing edge cases, and wrangling JavaScript. It also covers the analysis technique that inspired the idea, first introduced by **Leonard Meyer** in the middle 20th century.

Meyer had one foot in psychology and one in musical analysis. His dissertation became a hugely influential book, **Emotion and Meaning in Music**, which outlines an approach to understanding how human emotions appear in the music we share with each other. He does this by following the patterns of expectation and release, which he signifies by accents. These patterns of accent with no-accent appear in English Literature as a 'foot' and are appropriated by Meyer for his theory: _iamb, trochee, amphibrach, anapest, dactyl_.

For example, a single opera can show a simple overall structure of three iambs, one for each act. These three acts can then be divided into several more patterns, where dramatic entrances or exits in the music show articulators of form. These are broken down further to individual arias, and further until we get to the accent relationship of a phrase, and even further to the individual notes.

**Monteverdi** does the opposite. By working with patterns instead of values, it showcases a unique approach for analyzing and understanding complex systems. It pulls from a mass of data and detects the pattern found around the point where a metric hits a configured max value. This is where it forms pulses, which it displays and processes in any number of ways. A centerpiece of the talk will be demoing Monteverdi with live metrics and playing music through attached MIDI devices.

The **Apache 2.0 licensed** code, including binary releases and container images, is at https://github.com/maroda/monteverdi

Missed Southern California Linux Expo? Catch up on the insights from the premier #opensource event in North America, which drew in 3K+ participants with insightful presentations and skill-building workshops!

Read the full #SCALE recap in the blog from #LPI Global Partnership Development Representative Harrison Amit, with thoughts from Jon maddog Hall: https://lpi.org/03nv

#DevOps #Linux #Sysadmin #softwaredevelopment #freesoftware #tech #SCALE21x #SCALE #SouthernCaliforniaLinuxExpo