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