The Art of Monitoring

by James Turnbull

A hands-on and introductory guide to the art of modern application and infrastructure monitoring and metrics. We start small and then build on what you learn to scale out to multi-site, multi-tier applications. The book is written for both developers and sysadmins. We focus on building monitored and measurable applications. We also use tools that are designed to handle the challenges of managing Cloud, containerised and distributed applications and infrastructure.

In the book we'll

* An introduction to monitoring, metrics and measurement.
* A scalable framework for monitoring hosts (including Docker and containers), services and applications built on top of the Riemann event stream processor.
* Graphing and metric storage using Graphite and Grafana.
* Logging with Logstash.
* A framework for high quality and useful notifications
* Techniques for developing and building monitorable applications
* A capstone that puts all the pieces together to monitor a multi-tier application.

Genres: Technology, Technical, Programming, Computer Science, Nonfiction

769 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 8, 2016

Reviews

[Dimitris · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book focuses HEAVILY on Riemann. I can not stress this enough.

So... if you're planning to dive into Riemann, this is a good starting point. It provides an introduction to Riemann and then takes you on a clear path, where every step is a problem you need to solve with Riemann. You'll end up with a quite decent infrastructure that monitors, collects, graphs, alerts.

For non-Riemann users: there are still things for you in this book. Getting started with the ELK stack, Graphite, Grafana, collectd and statsd, getting your stats in place and your graphs up. Sure, they're all hooked up to the example Riemann installation, but you still get the idea. There are a few tips here and there about scaling and tuning this infrastructure but I felt that they move the hot-potato of explaining in depth to other books or websites.

I should point out that I am not disappointed to have read this book. I got a fairly good overview of what collectd and statsd have to offer and where exactly they differ, as well as verified some of my own ideas on what a modern monitoring infrastructure looks like. It is however aimed mainly towards beginners.

[Alexander Yakushev · Rating 3 out of 5]

Should rather be called "The Soul-sucking Drudgery of Monitoring". I expected this book to be primarily about whys, not hows, but in that regard it completely underdelivered. Plenty of technical details, plenty of hand-in-hand guidance, and, unfortunately, all of it will be outdated like in a year. What's even sadder is that the author clearly did care — a lot of effort went into the book, it's lovingly composed and structured. Three stars for trying.

[Andy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some useful information in between super detailed installation and setup instructions of a few tools.

If you want to learn how to install and configure Riemann, this book is great. If you want to learn about the tradeoffs of different monitoring and logging solutions, not so much.

Overall not bad, but I really didn't want to be reading how to run "sudo apt-get install riemann".

[Sebastian Gebski · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sadly only 3 stars ;/ It doesn't mean it's a bad book, but ... Ok, first things first:

Pros:
* if there's a need for a person with a great knowledge regarding all aspects of monitoring, James Turnbull is a great pick, no doubt about that
* book covers a selection of VERY interesting tools - for some of them it's the only good book about them - e.g. Riemann, collectd, Graphite
* except of a _very_ good introduction to theory of monitoring (initial ~15% of the book) & covering all dimensions of monitoring (incl. logging, notifications, etc.), it's practical to the EXTREME - there are tons of samples, examples, cases, small & big scenarios
* as Riemann (that is the main tool covered in the book) is using Clojure DSL, there's a primer on that language attached at the end of the book - IMHO it should be sufficient (I didn't dig into it much as I'm quite ok with Clojure already)
* there's a great chapter on monitoring Docker containers - personally I've found it very useful

Cons:
* book is very "tool-centric" - what does it mean? if you want to use a different stack, you won't find it very beneficial to you; fortunately the proposed toolset is OSS-based & very general purpose, so it can be applied in many very different scenarios
* code samples & scenarios (>65% of the book) are VERY detailed & low level, what makes them truly hard to track if you're not reading the book with the full access to your local console ;/ it's just that "learning by _really_ doing" kind of book - which may be great, but also annoying sometimes
* the last point has some assumed implication - I have a strong feeling that this book's content may get outdated pretty fast: OSS tools have high change dynamics, so in half a year pretty significant part of the syntax may not work at all anymore ...

In general - I'm impressed with author's knowledge, with Riemann's flexibility, with what can be easily presented using ELK of Grafana, I'm totally bought by the concept of proactive monitoring, but ... I don't think this is the optimal form of the monitoring book, so I can't easily recommend it for everyone. But if you're a SRE/DevOp/Op who look for some resource on Riemann/collectd, go for it.

[Rafał Łasocha · Rating 1 out of 5]

Stopped reading after 4 chapters. As a developer and occasional devops I hoped to read about best-practices and a broad overview of all the things I need to take care of when setting up an infrastructure for a project and comparison, why would I choose one tool over the other. The book turns out to be very hard to read, because there is a lot of technical details which is generally available in the internet. Reading "how to install package on ubuntu", "how to install package on redhat", "click here, click there, hit enter" just turns my brain off and I catch myself not knowing what I'm reading every few pages. I think author has a deep experience, but didn't chose the right bits of knowledge to write in the books.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book takes the reader through the process of setting up a monitoring system. The end result is a pretty good monitoring system so it is useful as an example. However, while it is very concrete and practical, it would have been improved by a chapter or two on the principles of what a monitoring system should aim to achieve and how the parts can deliver that. There is some of that, but not nearly enough.

[Erlend · Rating 3 out of 5]

While this book has some great content and to a large extent actually does deliver what its title promises, it is all woven into quite specific examples of using specific products. This made it very tempting to skim the long sections of the book with code and config files for products you're not using.

It's still a good book, but somewhat tedious to read if you're not using the specific technologies the author is using.

[Venkatesh-Prasad · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked up this book assuming it would cover design choices involved in developing monitoring and logging solutions. However, this book was a how-to about implementing a monitoring and logging solution using specific features of specific services+libraries. Having dealt with log collection and analytics for various purposes, I found the list of services and libraries useful.

If you are interested in higher level aspects of logging (and, may be, monitoring), I recommend "I logs".

[G Scott Walters · Rating 4 out of 5]

First half of the book discusses the philosophy of modern systems monitoring. The second half was a instruction manual to implement a solution using open source tools.

I read the first half, and skipped the second.

[Edgar Hernandez · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book claims to be for developers too, which I think is misleading. Devs would rarely require to install the monitoring features of apps but to use them. This book is about installing an entire monitoring system from scratch.

It's very practical but not in the matters I care most as a dev.

[Ben Morris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great resource for infrastructure engineering in the age of Docker containers and Kubernetes.

[Yabir Canario · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not recommended

This is more a Riemman tutorial than a theory book. More code than good practices. Not useful for anyone working with any other tool.

[Stein Karlsen · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little to specific to the technology used - lots of pages of installation on different operating systems. Not exactly an art, more like a guide book.

[William Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are looking to deepen your knowledge of systems, monitoring, and visualizing that output this book is a fantastic place to turn. Well written, but requiring a sturdy amount of industry experience to utilize, Turnbull steps you through the tools of our time for effectively keeping track of whats important with your deployed applications.

[Simon Mccartney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent insight into the why & how to monitor a modern application

Thoroughly recommended to new comers & experienced IT staff, a little slowly paced if you don't treat it a working guide following along, but the follow along steps are one of the strongest points, if you want to build everything discussed on the book, all of the steps & resources are there, wonderfully filling in the blanks that can often make new comers or transition people stuck & left out. It should be on the reading list for any development, operations, support & management involved in delivering an it service.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good topic, though it's unlikely you'll end up using that exact tech stack. I *really* wish Turnbull would explain the *why* of many of his decisions and focus less on implementation detail - stuff we can get from SO. It's clear he understands the topic really well, just he's overly focused on the *how*.

[Horst Gutmann · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are some great methods described here ... sadly in a far to detailed and tool-centric way.

[Tomasz Cholewa · Rating 3 out of 5]

First few chapters are okay, but there are too many detailed commands described and configurations that takes almost half of the book.

[Hemanth Kapila · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting, coherent and detailed view of monitoring. Covers a lot of tools (with emphasis on a few).

[Madhur Ahuja · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolutely must read this book for anyone in Tech. Deep dive tech into Riemann, Graphite, Grafana, collectd and ELK stack.

[Leandro López · Rating 5 out of 5]

A more apt name would have been: The Art of Riemann. It's a good book, with many examples, but it is *heavily* centered in just one tool rather than the processes and ideas behind monitoring.

[Herman Seip · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a moving target.

[Varun · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very nice book on complete monitoring tips and strategies.