Preface

Monitoring, in my experience, is usually seen as the last step of the software development life cycle. It is, in most cases, the last of the DevOps life cycle under the operate section. This has made monitoring be on the back burner of the software development life cycle (SDLC). Monitoring is only mentioned when systems start having problems, such as availability and reliability. Then the monitoring infrastructure is questioned in terms of its viability and its availability.

This should not be the case – when an application is being planned, monitoring should be a part of it. This is the role observability plays, taking monitoring to a whole new level. Observability is now built into an application that is being developed to allow internal traceability of the flow of transactions within the system.

This is kind of mindset and new method to monitoring, we will be able to draw good insights into the workings of applications as they are running and also be able to predict issues before they escalate to eventually become incidents.

A great deal of this book has been spent looking at monitoring from the angle of core and common AWS services used by organizations all over the world. This book will also teach best practices that can and should be employed as part of the availability, reliability, and survival of your application. Continually evolving your monitoring solution and ensuring even the smallest types of monitoring, as basic as endpoint monitoring, can make a big difference in your applications.

If you are just hearing about monitoring for the first time, this book is also for you. It will leave you with a solid foundation of the basic principles of monitoring and how monitoring started and grew to where it is now, and then take you through how monitoring works for different services in the AWS ecosystem.