Books
This page lists books that I've written, as well as links to purchase them. If you like them, please leave a review on Amazon or GoodReads!
Learning OpenTelemetry
OpenTelemetry is a revolution in observability data. Instead of running multiple uncoordinated pipelines, OpenTelemetry provides users with a single integrated stream of data, providing multiple sources of high-quality telemetry data: tracing, metrics, logs, RUM, eBPF, and more. This practical guide shows you how to set up, operate, and troubleshoot the OpenTelemetry observability system.
Authors Austin Parker, head of developer relations at Lightstep and OpenTelemetry Community Maintainer, and Ted Young, cofounder of the OpenTelemetry project, cover every OpenTelemetry component, as well as observability best practices for many popular cloud, platform, and data services such as Kubernetes and AWS Lambda. You'll learn how OpenTelemetry enables OSS libraries and services to provide their own native instrumentation—a first in the industry.
Ideal for application developers, OSS maintainers, operators and infrastructure teams, and managers and team leaders, this book guides you through:
- The principles of modern observability
- All OpenTelemetry components—and how they fit together
- A practical approach to instrumenting platforms and applications
- Methods for installing, operating, and troubleshooting an OpenTelemetry-based observability solution
- Ways to roll out and maintain end-to-end observability across a large organization
- How to write and maintain consistent, high-quality instrumentation without a lot of work
Distributed Tracing in Practice
Since most applications today are distributed in some fashion, monitoring their health and performance requires a new approach. Enter distributed tracing, a method of profiling and monitoring distributed applications―particularly those that use microservice architectures. There’s just one problem: distributed tracing can be hard. But it doesn’t have to be.
With this guide, you’ll learn what distributed tracing is and how to use it to understand the performance and operation of your software. Key players at LightStep and other organizations walk you through instrumenting your code for tracing, collecting the data that your instrumentation produces, and turning it into useful operational insights. If you want to implement distributed tracing, this book tells you what you need to know.
You’ll learn:
- The pieces of a distributed tracing deployment: instrumentation, data collection, and analysis
- Best practices for instrumentation: methods for generating trace data from your services
- How to deal with (or avoid) overhead using sampling and other techniques
- How to use distributed tracing to improve baseline performance and to mitigate regressions quickly
- Where distributed tracing is headed in the future