Diagnostics WG Summit - Feb 12-13, 2018 - Ottawa, ON Canada

[mike-kaufman]

Diagnostics WG Summit

• Feb 12-13, 2018
• Ottawa, ON Canada
• Location Details & Accommodations: 2016 Ottawa_visitor_guide.pdf

Proposed Agenda

Day 1 - Feb 12 2017

Key Themes - Part1 8:30 - 9:00 - Arrive and settle in 9:00 - 9:10 - Introductions 9:10 - 9:20 - End user perspectives (Netflix) 9:20 - 9:30 - Agenda review 9:30 - 10:00 - Post Mortem - priorities/issues

10:00 - 10:30 - break

Key Themes - Part 2 10:30 - 11:00 - Monitoring - priorities/issues 11:00 - 11:15 - Debugging - priorities/issues 11:15 - 11:30 - Platform neutrality/APIs 11:30 - 12:00 - Testing and Documenation

12:00 - 1:00 - Lunch

1:00 - 3:00 - Breakout 1 3:00 - 3:30 - Break 3:30 - 5:30 - Breakout 2 5:30 - 6:00 - Demo from James/Matteo

6:30 - Dinner

Day 2 - Feb 13 2017 9:00 - 11:00 - Breakout 3 11:00 - 1:00 - Breakout 4

1:00 - 2:00 - lunch

2:00 - 3:15 - Breakout review 3:15 - 3:30 - Break 3:30 - 5:00 - Breakout review continued, recap and actions

The agenda is structured as a review of the key themes related to Diagnostics in order lay the context for for the more in depth breakout sections, the breakout sessions themselves and then finally a review of the output from the breakout sections and creation of an action plan going forward.

Attendees:

1. @mhdawson
2. @mcollina
3. @mike-kaufman
4. @Qard
5. @hashseed
6. @watson
7. @mrkmarron
8. @jasnell
9. @danielkhan
10. @komawar
11. @joyeecheung
12. @cjihrig
13. @fhinkel
14. @jkrems
15. @ofrobots
16. @dshaw
17. @kjin
18. @aruneshchandra
19. @hekike
20. @mmarchini
21. @Flarna
22. @Hollerberg
23. @distracteddev
24. @apapirovski
25. @skaegi
26. @Fishrock123

Doc to refine subtopics/discussion points: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mB3nrCOhgKPEpPebpUEBDZQse6yKX4vwuwj-RpAWXWI/edit?usp=sharing

[mhdawson]

Will look into how to book a Room in our office in Ottawa and then suggest a date/time

[watson]

I'm in California for work from the Feb 26th to Mar 6th

[danielkhan]

Thank you for setting that up. I'll definitely attend if it's not in the last week of January. We should also ping @nodejs/post-mortem because if we merge, the summit would be a great kick off for that.

[mhdawson]

To start the discussion.

@nodejs/diagnostics @nodejs/post-mortem @nodejs/tsc

I would suggest we hold the summit on Mon Feb 12 and Tue Feb 13 in Ottawa at the IBM office. The weekends before/after include Winderlude if you like skating and the IBM office is close the airport if you want to just fly in/out. Please comment as to wether you want to participate and if those those days work for you or not and we'll either confirm or iterate as necessary.

I would suggest we structure discussion in terms of themes as we did at the first vm summit.

The themes I'd have in mind (probably incomplete, please make additional suggestions) would be:

• Post mortem diagnosis

  • Core tooling that should be part of Node.js itself
  • heapdump generation
  • node report generation (light weight easy to consume dump)
  • core dump generation
  • Core dump introspection
  • llnode, mdb, etc.
  • javascripts APIs
  • maintenance/automation of keeping required data up to date
  • Supporting Promises/async functions
  • What is missing ?

• Monitoring

  • Asynchronous context tracking
  • Async Hooks
  • Tracing
  • Adding Node.js trace points
  • Flight recorder
  • Loader Hooks ?
  • Profiling
  • What else should Node.js have in order to support great monitoring

• Debugging

  • Not sure what we need to discuss on this front....

• Documentation/Guidance

  • Module developers guide (as discussed in VM summit in Germany)
  • How to investigate common issues

• Testing

  • We don't necessarily have good testing or visibility into the testing we do have
  • Diagnostics test pass/fail should be a release criteria ?

• Platform neutrality/APIs

  • Expanding N-API to cover diagnostics APIs ?
  • Platform neutral internal APIs

• What's missing

  • How does Node.js stack up against other languages in terms of diagnostics
  • Would be good to be able to capture what we have, what we need to work on and have deck to position that Node.js is good from a diagnostics point of view (possibly after some work)

We can structure however we want but at the first vm summit we had the following general approach

• Morning of first day, discuss key themes as a group. At the end of the morning identify groups that want to break out to discuss specific themes
• Afternoon of first day/Morning of second day groups meet to discuss specific themes, make concrete plans for next steps and start working on those steps.
• Afternoon of second day get back together as a full group and each sub-group presents an overview of what they discussed/planned/completed.

Depending on the number of people we get and the interest in the themes it may or may not make sense to break out into sub-groups.

[jasnell]

Definitely +1, glad to see this move forward. I'll definitely be there.

[jasnell]

I will say that Feb 13th is not a great day as I would need to leave early in order to not be traveling on Feb 14th... which is problematic from a My-Wife-Will-Kill-Me-If-I'm-Gone-On-Valentines-Day perspective. That said, Feb 8-9 and Feb 19-23 are out for me also.

[dshaw]

+1

[danielkhan]

+1

[benjamingr]

Would be amazing to see a push for a better postmortem story for async functions.

[mhdawson]

@benjamingr I knew I was forgetting something. I had thought of that at one point but missed it when putting together the overview.

[mhdawson]

@benjamingr added

Supporting Promises/async functions

under the post mortem section. If that's not what you had in mind just give me some text to add

[ofrobots]

I'm tentative. I have other travel planned for the second half of Feb. I will be able to confirm closer to the date.

[jkrems]

I'll be there and I'm pretty flexible about the dates.

[benjamingr]

@mhdawson that's exactly what I meant, thank you for including and considering it.

[komawar]

I would like to attend, prefer Feb.

[hashseed]

I would like to attend as well.

[watson]

Those dates sounds fine with me 👍

[mhdawson]

@bmeurer FYI in case you have not seen this yet.

[bmeurer]

I have seen this already, yes. Chatted with @hashseed today and we decided it makes a lot of sense for him to go, since he knows the relevant parts of V8 a lot better than I do. 👍

[watson]

How soon can we settle on dates? I'd prefer to buy plane tickets and book hotel before it gets too expensive 😃

[mhdawson]

@watson, would a target of agreeing by mid-to-end next week work ?

So far it sounds like my proposed dates are ok but was thinking we should give it a few more days given the Thanksgiving weekend in the US.

[watson]

Absolutely, no problem 😃

[kjin]

+1, mid-February would be great.

[fhinkel]

I'll probably be joining, too. Are the dates set yet?

[cjihrig]

These dates work for me.

[mhdawson]

We are pretty much set on Mon Feb 12 and Tue Feb 13. I have a room booked that should hold 20. I just want to take a look at it tomorrow when I'm in the office and then I will comment here confirming.

[dshaw]

@mike-kaufman Once @mhdawson gives the final go ahead, can you please update the issue with the final dates so folks can start booking travel?

If anyone needs travel assistance, please request here: https://github.com/nodejs/admin/blob/master/MEMBER_TRAVEL_FUND.md

[joyeecheung]

I am tentative to be there and discuss about post-mortem stuff (mostly llnode), although I don't think my employer is going to sponsor the trip..I'll see if a travel fund request is needed when the dates are set.

[mhdawson]

Room looks good so we are set for Feb 12, 13.

[mhdawson]

I work on a more detailed agenda over the next week so if you have any additional suggestions for topics please let me know.

[mike-kaufman]

@mhdawson - would be great if you could update issue summary at top to provide address/location so ppl can book convenient hotels. We should fill in agenda there too when it firms up.

[mhdawson]

Visitor guide with address, location info as well as hotel info.

2016 Ottawa_visitor_guide.pdf

[mcollina]

I hope to be able to attend!

[Qard]

I, too, am hoping to attend. 👌

[hashseed]

Already booked my flight. Do I need to register myself anywhere?

[watson]

I plan to fly in the day before (maybe before) and leaving the day after

[mhdawson]

Indicating your intent to come here, should be enough. I'll check into what info I need in terms of getting badges etc and then follow up in this issue.

[mrkmarron]

I will plan to attend as well.

[jasnell]

ping @mhdawson ... @mcollina and I would like to grab 30 minutes in the schedule to demo a few bits we've been working on with @AndreasMadsen

[mhdawson]

@jasnell ack.

[danielkhan]

I'll come as well.

[mcollina]

At what time will we be finishing on the 13th?

[mhdawson]

@mcollina I was thinking we use the 2 days, something like 9-5 each day, but open to other suggestions if people think something different would make sense.

[watson]

Flights booked: I'll arrive Sunday and fly out again Wednesday

[Qard]

Same. 🎉

[komawar]

I intend to attend

[mhdawson]

Proposed agenda. I'll leave a few days for comments and then pull up into the body of the issue above: (Updated based on comments up to 3 Jan)

Proposed Agenda

Day 1 - Feb 12 2017

Key Themes - Part1 8:30 - 9:00 - Arrive and settle in 9:00 - 9:20 - Introductions 9:20 - 9:30 - Agenda review 9:30 - 10:00 - Post Mortem - priorities/issues

10:00 - 10:30 - break

Key Themes - Part 2 10:30 - 11:00 - Monitoring - priorities/issues 11:00 - 11:15 - Debugging - priorities/issues 11:15 - 11:30 - Platform neutrality/APIs 11:30 - 12:00 - Testing and Documenation

12:00 - 1:00 - Lunch

1:00 - 3:00 - Breakout 1 3:00 - 3:30 - Break 3:30 - 5:30 - Breakout 2 5:30 - 6:00 - Demo from James/Matteo

6:30 - Dinner

Day 2 - Feb 13 2017 9:00 - 11:00 - Breakout 3 11:00 - 1:00 - Breakout 4

1:00 - 2:00 - lunch

2:00 - 3:15 - Breakout review 3:15 - 3:30 - Break 3:30 - 5:00 - Breakout review continued, recap and actions

The agenda is structured as a review of the key themes related to Diagnostics in order lay the context for for the more in depth breakout sections, the breakout sessions themselves and then finally a review of the output from the breakout sections and creation of an action plan going forward.

Attendees: @mhdawson @mcollina @mike-kaufman @Qard @hashseed @watson @mrkmarron @jasnell @danielkhan @komawar @joyeecheung @cjihrig @fhinkel @jkin @jkrems @ofrobots @dshaw @kjin

Current list of subtopics:

Post mortem diagnosis

Core tooling that should be part of Node.js itself heapdump generation node report generation (light weight easy to consume dump) core dump generation Core dump introspection llnode, mdb, etc. javascripts APIs maintenance/automation of keeping required data up to date Supporting Promises/async functions What is missing ?

Monitoring

Asynchronous context tracking Async Hooks Tracing Adding Node.js trace points Flight recorder Loader Hooks ? Profiling What else should Node.js have in order to support great monitoring

Documentation/Guidance

Module developers guide (as discussed in VM summit in Germany) How to investigate common issues

Testing

We don't necessarily have good testing or visibility into the testing we do have Diagnostics test pass/fail should be a release criteria ? Platform neutrality/APIs

Platform neutrality/APIs Expanding N-API to cover diagnostics APIs ? Platform neutral internal APIs

[benjamingr]

Hey, I would have loved to attend but I don't have the time off and it would be immediately after a lengthy(ish) vacation - so I won't be able to attend.

I would love to see the promise/post-mortem-debugging story improve as well as discussion of instrumentation. I'd love to see discussion between V8 people (such as @hashseed ) and people who have a stake in post-mortem debugging discuss what can be done about promises.

[watson]

@mhdawson s/Quard/Qard/

[mike-kaufman]

@mhdawson - Thank for putting agenda together. Let's discuss on next Diag WG call. There's a few things that I'm not 100% clear on (e.g., "flight recorder"). Also, I was thinking it would be helpful (at least to me) to get to "next level" detail on the agenda items (e.g., list of related issues, key themes/problems explicitly called out, desired outcomes from summit). I wanted to check w/ others if they thought this useful as well & if so, best approach to get there. Chime in here, or we can discuss on Jan 10 call.