Monitoring and Observability for Application Developers

Nowadays, many organizations and individuals produce applications for their businesses. Unfortunately, these apps may be plagued by bugs, slow speeds, or poor performance. How can you know that your app is performing at an acceptable standard? Monitoring and observability are key to ensuring continuous uptime and delivery for your applications.

Application monitoring is the process by which developers can identity, measure, and evaluate how well an application is working. Monitoring allows developers to proactively watch and fix issues in application performance. Observability, on the other hand, refers to how well an application can be monitored by the data gained from monitoring. Monitoring and observability work together to provide insights into your system and keep it in working order.

This course provides a comprehensive overview of monitoring and observability. You will learn the fundamentals of monitoring, observability, and evaluation, as well as popular tools for application monitoring, such as Prometheus and Grafana. The course will also cover data visualization tools used in monitoring, like Kibana and Splunk.

The course will also cover the Three Pillars of Observability, and you will learn how to work with the OpenTelemetry framework and how to create logs with Mezmo.

Throughout this course, you will participate in multiple interactive labs to gain experience with monitoring and observability skills, as well as the popular tools mentioned above. This will provide you with hands-on experience with the tools and skills used every day by professionals.

In the final project, you’ll apply the knowledge you’ve gained to a real-world application scenario. You will be able to demonstrate your knowledge of monitoring and observability, and you will gain the confidence to perform these tasks in a practical setting.

Module 1: Introduction to Monitoring for Applications
Lesson 1: Monitoring Basics

• Video: Introduction to Monitoring
• Video: Types of Monitoring
• Video: Golden Signals of Monitoring
• Summary and Highlights: Monitoring Basics
• Practice Quiz: Monitoring Basics

Lesson 2: Objectives of Monitoring

• Video: Difference between Monitoring and Evaluation
• Video: Components of a Monitoring System
• Video: Types of Metrics in a Monitoring System
• Video: Importance of Monitoring
• Summary and Highlights: Objectives of Monitoring
• Practice Quiz: Objectives of Monitoring

Lesson 3: Glossary and Graded Quiz

• Reading: Module 1 Glossary: Introduction to Monitoring for Applications
• Quiz: Module 1 Graded Quiz: Introduction to Monitoring for Applications

Module 2: Monitoring Systems and Techniques
Lesson 1: Implementing Monitoring

• Video: Introduction to Synthetic Monitoring
• Video: Tools of Synthetic Monitoring
• Video: Introduction to Application Monitoring
• Video: Introduction to Prometheus
• Lab: Hands-on Lab: Monitoring in Action with Prometheus
• Video: Choosing the Right Application Monitoring Tool
• Video: Introduction to Grafana
• Lab: Hands-on Lab: Monitoring in Action with Grafana
• Reading: Summary and Highlights: Implementing Monitoring
• Practice Quiz: Implementing Monitoring

Lesson 2: Monitoring Techniques

• Video: Using Visualization in Monitoring
• Video: Alerting in Monitoring
• Reading: Summary and Highlights: Monitoring Techniques
• Practice Quiz: Monitoring Techniques

Lesson 3: Cheat Sheet, Glossary, and Graded Quiz

• Cheat Sheet: Monitoring Systems and Techniques
• Reading: Module 2 Glossary: Monitoring Systems and Techniques
• Quiz: Module 2 Graded Quiz: Monitoring Systems and Techniques

Module 3: Methodologies and Tools in Logging
Lesson 1: Logging

• Video: Introduction to Logging
• Video: Log Monitoring Tools
• Video: Distributed Logging and Tracing
• Reading: Summary and Highlights: Logging
• Practice Quiz: Logging

Lesson 2: Logging Implementation

• Video: Implementing Logging
• Video: Log Storage
• Lab: Hands-on Lab: Analyze HTTP Logs
• Reading: Summary and Highlights: Logging Implementation
• Practice Quiz: Logging Implementation

Lesson 3: Introduction to Mezmo

• Video: Mezmo Overview and Demo Video
• Lab: Hands-on lab: Create a Parsing Template using Mezmo
• Reading: Summary and Highlights: Introduction to Mezmo
• Practice Quiz: Introduction to Mezmo

Lesson 4: Glossary and Graded Quiz

• Reading: Module 3 Glossary: Methodologies and Tools in Logging
• Quiz: Module 3 Graded Quiz: Methodologies and Tools in Logging

Module 4: Observability and Concepts
Lesson 1: Observability

• Video: What is Observability?
• Video: The 3 Pillars of Observability
• Video: Cloud Native Observability
• Video: Cloud Native Observability Tools
• Video: Introduction to Sampling
• Video: IBM Instana Overview and Demo Video
• Lab: Hands-on Lab: Observability in Action with Instana (Sandbox)
• Reading: Summary and Highlights: Observability
• Practice Quiz: Observability

Lesson 2: Tracing using OpenTelemetry

• Video: Introduction to Telemetry
• Video: Telemetry and Tracing Tools
• Lab: Hands-on Lab: Automated Instrumentation with OpenTelemetry
• Reading: Summary and Highlights: Tracing using Open Telemetry
• Practice Quiz: Tracing using Open Telemetry

Lesson 3: Monitoring Containers

• Video: Tracing for Container-Based Applications
• Lab: Hands-on Lab: Kubernetes Configuration for Tracing
• Reading: Summary and Highlights: Monitoring Containers
• Practice Quiz: Monitoring Containers

Lesson 4: Cheat Sheet, Glossary, and Graded Quiz

• Cheat Sheet: Observability and Concepts
• Reading: Module 4 Glossary: Observability and Concepts
• Quiz: Module 4 Graded Quiz: Observability and Concepts

Module 5: Final Project
Lesson 1: Final Project

• Final Project: Overview and Project Scenario
• Final Project (Part 1): Getting Started with Instana: Setup and Creating Dashboard
• Final Project (Part 2): Monitoring the Robotshop Application using Instana

Lesson 2: Final Assessment (20 questions, 5 from each module)

• Final Assessment

Lesson 3: Course Wrap-up

• Reading: Glossary: Monitoring and Observability for Development and DevOps
• Reading: Congratulations and Next Steps
• Reading: Thanks from the Course Team