• Effective Monitoring and Alerting: For Web Operations
• by Slawek Ligus
• Read: Jan 6, 2016

I was really looking forward to this book as I’ve heard good things about it and thought it would round up what I already knew about the topic. However right from the start it felt rather awkward. The author is trying to maintain an abstract high level view on monitoring and alerting and not go into specific implementations. This makes for an awkward combination with it being basically a 101/introductory book on the topic. A lot of the formal descriptions of monitoring and alerting feel forced and don’t hold up in the abstract very well and are too high level to be practical. He also talks about operations in an almost romantic hero style way which I didn’t enjoy. In addition to that the book also includes some final chapters on outage handling and organizational and cultural setups. The terms human error, root cause analysis, and “5 Whys” are thrown around a lot with no acknowledgement of it being actually harmful to learning according to modern research in the field of systems safety. Definitely not a book I would recommend.