Software Telemetry: Reliable Logging and Monitoring

"Do you want to learn more about software telemetry? Don't look any further, this book is the one you need." - Sander Zegveld

Software telemetry is the discipline of tracing, logging, and monitoring infrastructure by observing and analyzing the events generated by the system. In Software Telemetry, you'll master the best practices for operating and updating telemetry systems. This practical guide is filled with techniques you can apply to any organization upgrading and optimizing their telemetry systems, from lean startups to well-established companies. You'll learn troubleshooting techniques to deal with every eventuality, such as building easily-auditable systems, preventing and handling accidental data leaks, and ensuring compliance with standards like GDPR.

about the technology
Complex systems can become black boxes. Telemetry provides feedback on what's happening inside. Telemetry systems are built for gathering, transforming, and communicating data on the performance, functionality, processing speeds, errors, and security events of production systems. There are many forms of telemetry systems, from classic centralized logging to cutting-edge distributed tracing that follows data across microservices. But despite their difference in functionality, all telemetry systems share core operational similarities--and best practices for optimizing them to support your business needs.

about the book
Software Telemetry is a guide to operating the telemetry systems that monitor and report on your applications. It takes a big picture view of telemetry, teaching you to manage your logging, metrics, and events as a complete end-to-end ecosystem. You'll learn the base architecture that underpins any software telemetry system, allowing you to easily integrate new systems into your existing infrastructure, and how these systems work under the hood. Throughout, you'll follow three very different companies to see how telemetry techniques impact a software-producing startup, a large legacy enterprise, and any organization that writes software for internal use. You'll even cover how software telemetry is used by court processes--ensuring that when your first telemetry discovery request arrives, there's no reason to panic!

what's inside
- Processes for legal compliance
- Cleaning up after toxic data spills and leaks
- Safely handling toxic telemetry and confidential records
- Multi-tenant techniques and transformation processes
- Updating metrics aggregation and sampling traces to display accurate data for longer
- Revising software telemetry emissions to be easier to parse
- Justifying increased spend on telemetry software

about the reader
For software developers and infrastructure engineers supporting and building telemetry systems.

about the author
Jamie Riedesel is a staff engineer at Dropbox. She has over twenty years of experience in IT, working in government, education, legacy companies, and startups. She has specialized in DevOps for the past decade, running distributed systems in public clouds, getting over workplace trauma, and designing software telemetry architectures.