Monitoring and observability
The key to observability is, of course, proper monitoring. Without the ability to monitor, there can be no awareness of the status of your systems and, consequently, no way to react to changes in those systems, be they adverse or otherwise.
In our examples, we will be looking at two kinds of monitoring: an orchestrated computing platform such as Docker Compose or Kubernetes, and a lightweight application such as a web server. We will be using the techniques we demonstrated in the previous chapter to track metrics generated by Telegraf; these principles are the same whether we’re talking about small servers or massive compute clouds. But first, let’s discuss some key concepts.
Monitoring processes
When we look at monitoring whether it’s on-premises or in the cloud, we tend to see the world from two main perspectives: how the system manages its processes, or the processes themselves. Either you are monitoring how processes are...
