The Art of Monitoring

A hands-on introductory book on the art of modern application and infrastructure monitoring and metrics.

Scalable

Start small and then build on what you learn to scale out to multi-site, multi-tier application monitoring.

Different

Written for both developers and sysadmins. Focuses on how to build monitored and measurable applications and how to operate those applications.

Modern

Use tools that are designed to handle the challenges of managing cloud and distributed infrastructure.

What's in the book?

Table of Contents

Art of Monitoring cover

  • Chapter 1: An Introduction to Monitoring
  • Chapter 2: Monitoring, Metrics and Measurement
  • Chapter 3: Events and metrics with Riemann
  • Chapter 4: Storing and graphing metrics, including Graphite and Grafana
  • Chapter 5: Host-based monitoring with collectd
  • Chapter 6: Monitoring hosts and services
  • Chapter 7: Containers - another kind of host
  • Chapter 8: Logs and Logging, covering structure logging and the ELK stack
  • Chapter 9: Building monitored applications
  • Chapter 10: Alerting and Alert Management
  • Chapters 11-13: Monitoring an application and stack
  • Appendix A: An introduction to Clojure

The Book

The Art of Monitoring is no longer for sale. The book's content has aged and no longer reflects current best practices in monitoring and observability.

Thank you to everyone who purchased the book over the years. Your support meant a great deal.

You can still find the errata here.

Meet the Author

James Turnbull

James Turnbull

James is an author and open source geek. His most recent books are The Packer Book, The Terraform Book, The Docker Book, about container virtualization tool Docker and The LogStash Book about the popular open source logging tool. James also authored two books about Puppet: Pro Puppet and the Pulling Strings with Puppet. He is the author or co-author of three other books, including Pro Linux System Administration, Pro Nagios 2.0, and Hardening Linux.

James was formerly CTO for Kickstarter. He was formerly VP of Services at Docker, VP of Engineering at Venmo and VP Technical Operations for Puppet Labs. He likes food, wine, books, photography, and cats. He is not overly keen on long walks on the beach and holding hands.

Keep in Touch

Questions? Issues? Get in touch.

Email

james@lovedthanlost.net