Best practices and troubleshooting for data collection
Throughout this book, we have repeatedly talked about the importance of preparation, setting objectives, and defining requirements. Doing the upfront thought work cannot be underestimated, but sadly, it is often completely overlooked. There are far too many occasions where I have investigated a company’s observability platform and discovered collection agents have been deployed without thought, opening the floodgates to send everything into the backend. The price is an excess of undefined telemetry, making it hard to do your job and causing expensive operating and storage costs.
In this section, we’ll be sharing some best practices for data collection, together with some useful troubleshooting tips. Let’s first look at preparation activities for data collection.
Preparing for data collection
Observability starts with a need or desire to monitor and observe systems, and to do that, we need data. However...