Welcome

Thank you kindly for purchasing the Cloud Observability in Action MEAP! I’d love to hear from you what you like and find useful but also what is missing and things you find not clearly explained or hard to understand. I am writing this book to capture and share my 20+ years of experience in data engineering and (since 2015) with cloud native systems. I assume you bring some background in cloud native systems (Kubernetes, Lambda, etc.) and are wondering how to go about observability.

Observability is the capability to continuously generate and discover actionable insights based on signals from the (cloud native) system under observation, with the goal to influence the system. The way we approach the topic is a Return-on-Investment driven one: we look at costs and benefits, from the sources to telemetry including agents to the signal destinations (back-ends such as time series datastores as well as frontends like Grafana).

Throughout the book, I’m using open source tooling including but not limited to OpenTelemetry (collector), Prometheus, Loki, Jaeger, and Grafana to demonstrate the different concepts and enable you to experiment with them, without any costs, other than your time.

I’m super excited that you decided we will walk this journey together for a while and looking forward to hearing from you, either via the forum or Twitter (@mhausenblas, my DMs are open, no need to follow me if you want to have a convo).