First off, I'd like to say that I think this is great and we need more books in this space.
I hope this can be seen as constructive criticism but I do have a few comments on the layout and content.
1. Free chapter - perhaps chapter one or two may have been a better choice. I'd like to know the philosophy behind monitoring expressed in the book before diving into the details.
2. capacity planning - A chapter on this would have been great. Most teams I've worked with have struggled with sizing, planning resources required and archiving strategies with their monitoring solutions.
3. Monitoring strategies for different levels in the stack - where do I start, what should my short term goals be and so on.
4. naming of some of the chapters are too focused on the technology- for example the chapter on logstash could have been renamed to something to do with application logging or log scrapping.
5. visualisation and communication of results - there could have been a chapter on dashboard and reporting. This is a common issue with teams trying to understand how to do this.
This was written in a bit of a hurry but I hope my points came through.
1. I decided not to do this because my experience is that people like to do something practical first. I've had a huge response to that chapter - lots of folks have gotten into Riemann that had previously been stuck. That alone is a solid +++ for me.
2. Each chapter contains some discussion of capacity planning for specific tools, where relevant.
3. The capstone chapters (11-13) discusses this, as do the chapters covering logging and application instrumentation.
4. Thanks - I'll consider that.
5. I discuss in various chapters visualization but I've found that most folks have very different needs and desires. So I focussed on discussing what to show in small segments as well as some visual design discussion rather than a specific chapter on dashboarding/reporting. Hard choice but a 750 page book needs to stop somewhere. :)
Thanks for taking the time to comment - it's awesome when folks share their thoughts!
As a side recommendation, I'm most of the way through The Practice of Cloud Administration, and it hits on most of the things you've mentioned. It's on SBO, so you likely have a copy through work.
To the "free chapter" idea - I think the website has a pretty good prospectus, and compared to other tech books / publishers, it's certainly well worth taking a flyer on it for a maximum of $20.
I hope this can be seen as constructive criticism but I do have a few comments on the layout and content.
1. Free chapter - perhaps chapter one or two may have been a better choice. I'd like to know the philosophy behind monitoring expressed in the book before diving into the details.
2. capacity planning - A chapter on this would have been great. Most teams I've worked with have struggled with sizing, planning resources required and archiving strategies with their monitoring solutions.
3. Monitoring strategies for different levels in the stack - where do I start, what should my short term goals be and so on.
4. naming of some of the chapters are too focused on the technology- for example the chapter on logstash could have been renamed to something to do with application logging or log scrapping.
5. visualisation and communication of results - there could have been a chapter on dashboard and reporting. This is a common issue with teams trying to understand how to do this.
This was written in a bit of a hurry but I hope my points came through.