chapter two

2 The emitting stage: creating and submitting telemetry

 

This chapter covers

  • What the emitting stage does
  • Emitting telemetry from software you’re developing
  • Emitting telemetry from hardware and third-party software
  • Emitting telemetry from Software-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service platforms
Figure 2.1: Telemetry System pipeline stages with the emitting stage first, showing where it fits in the overall telemetry pipeline. The Emitting Stage is where telemetry enters the pipeline from the production systems. Production systems can be code, where the Emitting Stage is often inside the production system itself, or hardware and Software-as-a-Service systems.

The Emitting Stage is the first stage in your pipeline, shown in figure 2.1, where telemetry generated by a production system enters the pipeline. This first stage can be many different things:

  • Your production code itself! A logging class inside the production code provides the needed formatting and telemetry delivery (section 2.1). There are several techniques you can use when emitting this way.
  • A hardware system like Cisco networking gear or Dell servers that you configure to emit telemetry (section 2.2).
  • A Software-as-a-Service or Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform such as Amazon Web Services, Azure, Atlassian products, or GitHub that is able to provide a telemetry stream (section 2.3).

2.1       Emitting from production code

2.1.1   Emitting telemetry into a log-file

2.1.2   Emitting telemetry into the system-log

2.1.3   Emitting telemetry into standard output

2.1.4   Formatting telemetry for emissions

2.2       Emitting from hardware

2.2.1   Explaining the Simple Network Management Protocol

2.2.2   Ingesting telemetry from a Cisco ASA firewall

2.3       Emitting from as-a-Service systems

2.3.1   Emitting events from a Software-as-a-Service system

2.3.2   Emitting events from Infrastructure-as-a-Service systems

2.4       Summary