The Art of Monitoring

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 deliver:

* 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.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Introduction

Chapter 2 A Monitoring and Measurement Framework

Chapter 3 Managing events and metrics with Riemann

Chapter 4 Introducing Graphite and Grafana

Chapter 5 Host monitoring

Chapter 6 Using collectd events in Riemann

Chapter 7 Containers: another kind of host

Chapter 8 Logs and logging

Chapter 9 Building Monitored Applications

Chapter 10 Notifications

Chapter 11 Monitoring Tornado: a capstone

Chapter 12 Monitoring Tornado: Application Tier

Chapter 13 Monitoring Tornado: Data tier

Appendix A An Introduction to Clojure and Functional Programming

About the Author

James Turnbull is the author of ten technical books about open source software and a long-time member of the open source community. He is a CTO-in-residence at Microsoft and was formerly CTO at educational technology startup Empatico, CTO at Kickstarter, VP of Services and Support at Docker, VP of Engineering at Venmo, and VP of Technical Operations Puppet.

James speaks regularly at conferences including Velocity, OSCON, Linux.conf.au, FOSDEM, OpenSourceBridge, DevOpsDays and a number of others. He is the co-chair of the Velocity conference, a past president of Linux Australia, a former committee member of Linux Victoria, was Treasurer for Linux.conf.au 2008, and serves on the program committees of Linux.conf.au and OSCON.

He likes food, wine, books, photography, and cats. He is not overly keen on long walks on the beach or holding hands.