Hands-On Infrastructure Monitoring with Prometheus: Implement and scale queries, dashboards, and alerting across machines and containers Kindle Edition

The book sets out to demystify the Prometheus/Grafana environment, but instead, the author gets lost in a narrative of using the environment he created for the proof of concept. It didn't help much with the configuration details, which in the book were in ready-made scripts, which weren't in the book but in its attachments. Thus, I understand that the book only served to consolidate concepts, which it did in a very superficial way. I will have to complement the knowledge by seeing other books or materials on the internet. I do not recommend !

This book is more than an overview of Prometheus and its components, it’s a full course on modern monitoring using this technology as a baseline. I’ve always struggled to understand time series fully until being presented with the hands-on examples available in this book, and for that, I’m thankful to the authors.

I really want to like this book. It is obvious that the authors worked very hard on constructing the examples.The book starts off well, with an excellent explanation of monitoring basics. Unfortunately the demos' explanations are generally lacking and I found them hard to follow, for example the explanation of histograms and summaries were incoherent and I needed to go to the Prometheus site for a comprehensible explanation. The graphics are black and white low res screenshots, that you need a microscope to read. You can download high-resolution color versions from the Packt websiteAfter the first few chapters, the book was obviously thrown together quickly and was not edited professionally.Chapter 5 was largely incoherent. "If you collect data at a greater interval than five minutes, you will get inconsistent results, and as such two minutes is the maximum sane value to allow for failures." Why??? No explanation. Many of these throughout the chapter and in fact throughout the rest of the book, it's infuriating. There are some 15 pages building up a Kubernetes configuration, which is really well thought out. However it is all controlled via minikube and kubectl, and there is virtually no explanation of what these commands are doing, so you're just typing arcane symbols without any explanation.One tip - save yourself a lot of typing. When you download the code, check the provisioning directory in every chapter for the configuration scripts.Important, the environment setup does not work with Windows. They could have told you that instead of saying it hasn't been tested with Windows. Ok so on the Mac, it works fine. It helps to know a bit about Kubernetes because the environment is all configured using kubectl and minikube.Bottom line - The first four chapters are excellent, but it is downhill from there. The examples are well done, but the explanations are generally unclear and sparse. The Kubernetes commands used throughout the book are never really explained. The book is laid out as here are the capabilities and here is how you configure them. It would have been much better if they presented it as "here are the problems and here is how you can solve them". I would not recommend this book unless you have a good understanding of Kubernetes and can dig into the example files without much help from the book. I don't blame the authors - they did a great job pulling the examples together. I blame Packt for releasing this with virtually no editing.UPDATE If you are looking for an excellent book on Prometheus, I highly recommend O'Reilly's Prometheus Up and Running. The prose or clear, the examples are bit-sized, and everything runs on Linux, which I am running on a docker container on Windows. You might want to start with the O'Reilly

The text is great. The authors are knowledgeable and able to express the collection of highly-technical topics that make up the world of monitoring and alerting in a way that greatly compliments available online documentation.Unfortunately, the publisher (Packt) thinks including grainy, 8-bit, monochrome image panels as the sole source for technical examples is adequate diligence before charing $35 for a print edition.If you genuinely need the information this book contains, go ahead. It is *not* a *complete* waste of money, but if you have suboptimal vision (I am very near-sighted), prepare to sit down with a magnifying lens and a ballpoint pen to annotate the pages with the cogent details hidden in the pixels.Seriously... anyone remember the Mimeograph?Note: the page shown on the attached photo, together with the opposite page consists of 15 lines of actual text with the rest of the page real estate given over to 3 image panels. The actual content encased in these images is not expressed elsewhere in legible text.

The book outline seems too good to be true but I think the authors did a very good job of focusing on the most important aspects of the Prometheus stack without leaving behind anything worth mentioning. Inside this book, we can find a full step by step guide with practical examples available on GitHub, relying not only on virtual machines but also in containers using Kubernetes. The writing, although technical, is straight to the point.Currently, we’re trying to implement Thanos at our company and this is the first book mentioning the project that I could find, only wish it could have more chapters about it. The diagram that made Thanos really click for me can be found in the photo attached.The testing environments are a great advantage to understand how all the components interact, making the learning experience straightforward.