Mainak Chakraborty - Monitoring Cloud-Native Applications: Lead Agile Operations Confidently Using Open Source Software

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When I was growing up, I was very fond of solving puzzles and reading detective stories. I would spend hours scratching my head about hidden treasure troves or solving a murder mystery on a lazy summer afternoon. I would picture myself inside the scene of action trying to catch the culprit red-handed from a vantage point in the attic. The characters would stay with me as I juggled around with the various possible scenarios and their equally plausible outcomes. Sometimes I would deduce the correct answer, mostly when I could see a pattern (or a motive), and be overjoyed with my feat. However, there were times when I would simply fail to come up with any solution and those were the times when I wished I had some superpowers.

Fast-forward to today where I am working on keeping a critical business application alive when suddenly all hell breaks loose. The application is down, customers are not able to access anything and the business is incurring losses by the second. What went wrong?

Don the detectives hat, get your spy glasses, and try to find out the answer. This is similar to searching for the missing necklace from the queens jewelry box, albeit infinitely more complex. There are many characters involved, some with motives and even some with no motive at all. Finding a pattern or juggling scenarios in your head may not be the right start to your investigations. What you need is a superpower. Voila!

This book is an exercise to provide you with that superpower to accurately find answers to the most critical questions when things start to go haywire with your application. You no longer need to rely on guesswork to find out what went wrong, nor do you need to use trial and error to fix a problem. We will help you get started with the concepts of monitoring, introduce you to popular open source monitoring tools, and help with finding the correct set of use cases for their implementation. The book covers in-depth technical details of open source software used in modern monitoring systems that are tailor-made for environments running microservices.

This book is divided into two parts. Part 1 starts with an introduction to cloud native applications and the foundational concepts of monitoring. It then walks you through the various aspects of monitoring containerized workloads using Kubernetes as the de facto orchestration platform. We will dive deep into the architecture of a modern monitoring system and look at its individual components in detail. Part 2 will introduce you to popular open source tools like Prometheus, TICK Stack, and Grafana, which are used by enterprises and startups alike and are well established as their tools of choice.

After reading this book, you will have a much better understanding of the key terminology and general concepts around observability. You will learn about the complete spectrum of open source monitoring solutions available for applications, microservices and containers and how to quickly reap the benefits. Armed with this knowledge, you will be able to lead day-to-day operations more confidently and be better equipped to navigate the mesh of services sprawling in your environment.