Practical Monitoring

by Mike Julian

12 Jan 2020 ★★★★★

Why I read it: Wanted to improve the alerting and monitoring setup at work and was looking for books about it.

What I liked about it: It really delivered what it promised. It is a concise guide to the basics of monitoring. Covering broad range of topics starting from patterns and antipatterns and going through different areas: frontend monitoring, application monitoring, server monitoring etc. Though I was already familiar with most of the ideas, it was nice to seem them summarized well in one place. Also I have to admit, I used to think “monitoring” and “application monitoring” is pretty much the same thing. Now I know there are more monitoring types out there.

What I disliked: My goal was to learn more about application monitoring and get some tips and tricks for it. So the book, being an overview of multiple types of monitoring, was a bit broad and shallow for my purpose.

Quotes: “It’s not ready for production until it is monitored.”

“Monitoring ought to be automatic. Question “Can you add this to monitoring” shouldn’t be needed.”

“If software engineers are aware of the struggles that come up during on call and they themselves are part of the rotation, then they are incentivised to build better software.”