Distributed Systems Observability

Network infrastructure is in the midst of a paradigm shift. As systems become more distributed, methods for building and operating them are rapidly evolving—and that makes visibility into your services and infrastructure more important than ever. In this practical ebook, author Cindy Sridharan examines new monitoring tools that, while promising, bring their own set of technical and organizational challenges.

Platforms such as Kubernetes have solved several problems that traditional monitoring tools used to flag, but partial, implicit, and "soft" failure modes have risen along with the overall complexity of the system. This ebook provides an honest overview of monitoring challenges and trade-offs to help you choose the best observability strategy for your distributed system.

• Learn the pros and cons of the three pillars of modern observability—logging, metrics collection, and request tracing
• Explore the challenges involved when logging, tracing, and metrics are used in conjunction
• Understand what you need to monitor in a modern cloud-native environment to derive alerts and insightful analysis
• Examine the current crop of monitoring systems using Prometheus for metrics and Jaegar for tracing
• Learn when it makes sense to use additional tools to augment logging, tracing, and metrics
• Get a blueprint for evolving your monitoring stack to include the latest advances in the space