Practical Guide to Modern Networking Telemetry

The Mostly Unnecessary Summary

The book you hold in your hands—if indeed, you’re holding an actual made-from-dead-trees book—likely has much less than what was originally written.

From the start of this project, we were acutely aware of the amount of information we wanted to share and the limited space in which we had to share it. Also, there are limitations to more ephemeral aspects: a reader’s interest in the esoterica of networking, database design, and monitoring. How far down the rabbit hole could we go?

In the end, O’Reilly and our editor, Gary O’Brien, gave us a lifeline in the form of an initial “raw and unedited” Early Release version that contained (almost) everything we wrote.¹ This allowed us to get initial reader reactions, which helped shape the print version and also gave us the freedom to write with minimal concern for space. Along with the aforementioned topics, we could include jokes about cucumbers, references to pop culture, a host of asides, and more. We’re deeply grateful to Gary and the rest of the O’Reilly team for giving us the space and the grace to fully explore our story, at least in the initial draft.

Our work in IT has taught us that not all designs, tools, or techniques apply to all circumstances. Likewise, not all ideas that get written in the first draft belong in the final version. To be sure, some of those initial ideas are fun and interesting, but ultimately, they don’t add enough value to justify the extra pages. The point, which is often ...