Practical Monitoring

Book excerpt: Do you have a nagging feeling that your monitoring needs improvement, but you just aren’t sure where to start or how to do it? Are you plagued by constant, meaningless alerts? Does your monitoring system routinely miss real problems? This is the book for you. Mike Julian lays out a practical approach to designing and implementing effective monitoring—from your enterprise application down to the hardware in a datacenter, and everything between. Practical Monitoring provides you with straightforward strategies and tactics for designing and implementing a strong monitoring foundation for your company. This book takes a unique vendor-neutral approach to monitoring. Rather than discuss how to implement specific tools, Mike teaches the principles and underlying mechanics behind monitoring so you can implement the lessons in any tool. Practical Monitoring covers essential topics including: Monitoring antipatterns Principles of monitoring design How to build an effective on-call rotation Getting metrics and logs out of your application