Overview
Monitoring and observability are critical components of modern infrastructure management. This training covers the tools, techniques, and best practices for implementing comprehensive monitoring solutions that provide visibility into system health, performance, and availability across cloud and on-premises environments.
Observability Fundamentals
Understanding the three pillars of observability—metrics, logs, and traces—is essential for building effective monitoring strategies.
- Metrics - Numerical measurements of system behavior over time
- Logs - Event records with context and timestamps
- Traces - Request flow tracking across distributed systems
- Alerting - Notification systems for anomalies and incidents
Prometheus
Prometheus is an open-source monitoring system with a powerful query language, designed for reliability and scalability in cloud-native environments.
- Architecture - Time series database, pull-based collection, service discovery
- PromQL - Prometheus Query Language for data analysis
- Exporters - Node exporter, blackbox exporter, custom exporters
- Alertmanager - Alert routing, grouping, and silencing
# prometheus.yml - Configuration example
global:
scrape_interval: 15s
evaluation_interval: 15s
alerting:
alertmanagers:
- static_configs:
- targets: ['alertmanager:9093']
rule_files:
- "alert_rules.yml"
scrape_configs:
- job_name: 'prometheus'
static_configs:
- targets: ['localhost:9090']
- job_name: 'node-exporter'
static_configs:
- targets: ['node1:9100', 'node2:9100']
- job_name: 'kubernetes-pods'
kubernetes_sd_configs:
- role: pod
relabel_configs:
- source_labels: [__meta_kubernetes_pod_annotation_prometheus_io_scrape]
action: keep
regex: true
Grafana
Grafana is the leading open-source platform for monitoring visualization, supporting multiple data sources and powerful dashboard capabilities.
- Dashboards - Creating and organizing visualizations
- Panels - Time series, gauges, tables, and custom visualizations
- Data Sources - Prometheus, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, CloudWatch
- Alerting - Grafana alerting rules and notification channels
# Grafana Dashboard JSON snippet
{
"dashboard": {
"title": "Infrastructure Overview",
"panels": [
{
"title": "CPU Usage",
"type": "timeseries",
"targets": [
{
"expr": "100 - (avg(irate(node_cpu_seconds_total{mode=\"idle\"}[5m])) * 100)",
"legendFormat": "CPU %"
}
],
"fieldConfig": {
"defaults": {
"unit": "percent",
"thresholds": {
"steps": [
{ "value": 0, "color": "green" },
{ "value": 70, "color": "yellow" },
{ "value": 90, "color": "red" }
]
}
}
}
}
]
}
}
AWS CloudWatch
CloudWatch provides monitoring and observability services for AWS resources and applications running on AWS.
- Metrics - Built-in and custom metrics for AWS services
- Logs - Centralized log management with Log Insights
- Alarms - Metric alarms, composite alarms, and anomaly detection
- Dashboards - Custom dashboards and automatic dashboards
Azure Monitor
Azure Monitor provides comprehensive monitoring for applications and infrastructure running on Azure and hybrid environments.
- Metrics & Logs - Platform metrics and Log Analytics workspace
- Application Insights - APM for application monitoring
- Alerts - Metric alerts, log alerts, and action groups
- Workbooks - Interactive reports and visualizations
ELK Stack
The ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) provides powerful log aggregation, search, and visualization capabilities.
- Elasticsearch - Distributed search and analytics engine
- Logstash - Log processing and transformation pipelines
- Kibana - Visualization and exploration interface
- Beats - Lightweight data shippers (Filebeat, Metricbeat)
# Logstash configuration example
input {
beats {
port => 5044
}
}
filter {
if [type] == "nginx" {
grok {
match => { "message" => "%{COMBINEDAPACHELOG}" }
}
date {
match => [ "timestamp", "dd/MMM/yyyy:HH:mm:ss Z" ]
}
geoip {
source => "clientip"
}
}
}
output {
elasticsearch {
hosts => ["elasticsearch:9200"]
index => "logs-%{+YYYY.MM.dd}"
}
}
Distributed Tracing
Distributed tracing helps track requests across microservices to identify performance bottlenecks and failures.
- Jaeger - Open-source distributed tracing platform
- OpenTelemetry - Vendor-neutral observability framework
- AWS X-Ray - Distributed tracing for AWS applications
- Correlation - Connecting traces with logs and metrics
Best Practices
Implement these best practices for effective monitoring and observability.
- SLIs/SLOs - Define service level indicators and objectives
- Alert Fatigue - Meaningful alerts with proper thresholds
- Infrastructure as Code - Version-controlled dashboards and alerts
- Runbooks - Documented response procedures for alerts
Want this training for your team?
I deliver hands-on sessions tailored to your stack, level and goals.