Practical Guide to Modern Networking Telemetry

Chapter 2. Wrangling Telemetry

Once you’ve identified the types of devices that make up your network and the types of data they emit, once you’ve inventoried your environment so you know how many of each type of device you have, and once you’ve instrumented—once all that’s happened and the data is streaming in…now what?

If we were a vendor of a monitoring and observability solution (spoiler: we are, but let’s all pretend we’re not for a second), this would be the place we’d show you all the fancy dashboards, sophisticated alerts, and stunning reports you would get if you bought our complete line of products. But it’s not really that simple.

Yes, it’s true that vendor solutions do a lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes. But this book is about exposing and elaborating on what that behind-the-scenes activity is so you can be a more informed customer. Knowing what happens inside observability solutions allows you to make educated decisions about everything from OTel methodology to aggregation options to pipeline management.

Once the data is extracted and obtained, there’s a whole set of decisions about how it will get normalized, tagged for identification, enriched with additional attributes, routed to (one or more) consuming systems, and finally analyzed and visualized. In other words, this chapter describes the way you transform data into information that drives action.

This also helps you make an educated choice about the build-versus-buy decision.

To be honest, as we were ...