In 2011 a Twitter hashtag called #monitoringsucks appeared. It was a response to the dearth of modern monitoring systems. Indeed, if you look around the open source ecosystem, the dominant player is still the venerable Nagios. There are a scattering of other players but innovation has been sadly lacking in the monitoring ecosystem. Perhaps you could argue the lack of innovation stems from the fallacy that monitoring is a solved problem.

I’ve just released a sample chapter for The LogStash Book. It’s available for download here and covers getting logs into LogStash without using the LogStash agent. Enjoy! And if you’re interested in further updates on the book please subscribe to the mailing list.

So I’ve now written six books. The last being The LogStash Book which is also my first self-published book. That total might seem a little crazy but I love doing it. Obviously there’s some ego involved. Making something that people use and even better thank you for is an awesome feeling. It’s a nice boost to the self-esteem.1 Of course it also comes with some slaps too. It’s amazing how easily people criticize things: “That sucked.

I am writing a new book in Markdown with splashes of LaTeX and using Pandoc to convert from the Markdown to LaTeX and then converting that to PDF. One of the challenges of this is what I’d call the “fiddly bits” of tweaking my output to suit me and to look awesome for the final product. One of these “fiddly bits” was adding captions to my code listings. After some playing around for a while I identified a simple way to do this.

Many moons ago I wrote a blog post called “Creating Puppet types and providers is easy…”. It’s one of the most popular posts on this blog and regularly gets a flurry of hits. Now my esteemed colleahies Nan Liu and Dan Bode have one-up’ed me and written a whole book about them. If you’re keen to develop for Puppet then this is the definitive guide. Puppet Types and Providers is available as a Kindle ebook as well as in a dead tree form.