Lonestar ElixirConf 2017- Creating a Nerves-based Status Monitor... by Andrew Selder
15Lonestar ElixirConf 2017- Creating a Nerves-based Status Monitor (or how to sneak Elixir into your company) by Andrew Selder
Like many of you, the organization I work for is deeply invested in an ecosystem other than Elixir, in our case Rails. However, we have lots of engineers interested in Elixir. The question: how do we get the rest of the developers interested and convince the bosses that Elixir is a worthwhile technology to invest in?
In deciding what to do, we had to consider the potential impact to our service (the Boss really frowns on taking down the site and annoying paying customers), the scope of the project (the Boss frowns on developers disappearing for a month to play with cool shiny things), intriguing the other engineers (engineers like cool shiny things). Balancing all these concerns was the key in getting buy-in from everyone.
We decided to build a status monitoring device using Nerves that shows the high level health of our app at a glance. We have LED strips showing recent apdex scores for our app (via NewRelic’s API), recent error rates (from Honeybadger), and the status of recent builds (from CircleCI), along with a big red flashing light for when Pingdom says our site is down.
For about $100 in parts, and a couple weekends of hacking, we built an appliance that was useful to the organization, showed off the power of Elixir/OTP, and was just darn cool!
In this talk, I'll go through how we created the appliance, the things we learned, and how this was a great project for introducing Elixir to the company. We’ll discuss why a Nerves based hardware project made sense given what we wanted to accomplish and the level of Elixir chops on the team. We’ll walk through the initial proposed design, and talk about how it evolved as we actually wrote the code. Finally we’ll take a look at the source code we ended up with, and see the monitor in all its glory.