Practical Guide to Modern Networking Telemetry

Chapter 3. Intro to Using Telemetry

While every solution has aspects, elements, and workflows that make it unique within the monitoring and observability space (which is, I don’t know, kind of obvious? Because otherwise why would people buy one specific product rather than another?), there are still commonalities in the behaviors and activities a user will do within any given monitoring/observability platform in a specific domain (i.e., network, app, or security observability). This chapter describes common actions to help you understand what’s reasonable to expect out of a solution (any solution), and conversely, which features might be unique, or even actions that are completely out of scope for any tool or platform of this type.

Before you start making assumptions, this chapter isn’t concerned with specific features or menu options like report writing or dashboards. It also will not focus on ways to make alerts actionable (they should be, but that’s not the point right now). It will also skip over the importance of RBAC controls in user management (again, super important, but not our focus in this chapter). Likewise, we’re not offering you a laundry list of features or capabilities that “all good monitoring platforms should have.” That inevitably leads to “no true Scotsman” logical fallacies, and we’re not going to fall into that old observability Sarlacc Pit.

Note

An example of the “no true Scotsman” fallacy can be found in How to Train Your Dragon. All Vikings are expected ...