Practical Monitoring: Effective Strategies for the Real World

Do you have a nagging feeling that your monitoring needs improvement, but you just aren’t sure where to start or how to do it? Are you plagued by constant, meaningless alerts? Does your monitoring system routinely miss real problems? This is the book for you.

Mike Julian lays out a practical approach to designing and implementing effective monitoring--from your enterprise application down to the hardware in a datacenter, and everything between. Practical Monitoring provides you with straightforward strategies and tactics for designing and implementing a strong monitoring foundation for your company.

This book takes a unique vendor-neutral approach to monitoring. Rather than discuss how to implement specific tools, Mike teaches the principles and underlying mechanics behind monitoring so you can implement the lessons in any tool.

Practical Monitoring covers essential topics including:

• Monitoring antipatterns
• Principles of monitoring design
• How to build an effective on-call rotation
• Getting metrics and logs out of your application

Mike Julian is Founder at Aster Labs, a consultancy that guides startups on building effective monitoring for their apps and infrastructure. Previously an operations engineer for more than a decade, Mike has worked with many well-known companies, including Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Peak Hosting, and Taos Consulting (where he worked with companies such as Synaptics, AirBnB, and a Target subsidiary). Often finding himself the champion of monitoring, Mike has helped numerous companies with designing and building better monitoring on their ever-elusive path to safer and more reliable infrastructure.

Mike is a transplant from Knoxville, Tennessee and currently resides in San Francisco, CA. When he s not pointing out monitoring antipatterns, Mike can be found enjoying a good wine, a late-night bonfire in the mountains, or the roar of a well-tuned v8 engine.

Find out more about Mike at MikeJulian.com and Aster Labs at AsterLabs.io.