Cloud-Native Observability Handbook: Practical Kubernetes Monitoring with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, and eBPF.

By James M. Kearns

Modern applications run on dynamic, distributed, cloud-native platforms like Kubernetes, where traditional monitoring falls short. Observability-the ability to understand what your system is doing through metrics, logs, traces, and runtime signals-is now mission-critical. Tools like OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, and eBPF empower teams to gain deep insights into their clusters, detect performance bottlenecks, and strengthen reliability at scale.

This handbook is written for engineers and DevOps practitioners by professionals who have operated production-grade Kubernetes clusters under real-world pressure. Drawing on proven practices, open-source tooling, and lessons learned from outages, it equips you with practical strategies rather than theoretical ideas.

Cloud-Native Observability Handbook is your end-to-end guide to designing, implementing, and running observability in Kubernetes environments. From foundational telemetry pipelines with OpenTelemetry to advanced runtime visibility using eBPF, this book takes you beyond dashboards and into a reliability-first mindset. You'll learn how to monitor APIs, debug policies, analyze service-level indicators (SLIs), run chaos experiments, and build incident response playbooks that actually work in production.

What's Inside

Step-by-step coverage of OpenTelemetry pipelines for logs, metrics, and traces

Practical Prometheus queries, alerts, and recording rules

Hands-on visualization and dashboards with Grafana

Deep kernel-level visibility using eBPF, Cilium, Hubble, Tetragon, and Falco

Managed cloud integrations (AWS CloudWatch, GCP Cloud Logging, Azure Application Insights)

Cost governance strategies for observability pipelines (sampling, retention, tiering)

Incident response playbooks, SLO/SLI workbooks, and outage simulation labs

This book is for SREs, DevOps engineers, platform teams, and software developers running Kubernetes in production or planning to migrate workloads. You don't need to be an observability expert-this handbook starts with practical foundations and builds up to advanced techniques. Whether you are debugging service meshes, scaling serverless workloads, or enforcing runtime security, you'll find actionable strategies tailored to your context.

Reliability is a competitive advantage. Every minute of downtime or blind troubleshooting increases costs and erodes customer trust. By investing in modern observability practices today, you shorten mean time to recovery (MTTR), improve uptime, and build a resilient system that scales with your business tomorrow.

If you want to master Kubernetes observability and reliability with the tools the industry trusts, this is the book you need. Equip yourself with practical skills, proven workflows, and modern observability strategies that reduce firefighting and increase confidence in your platform.

Take control of your Kubernetes monitoring today-your future self (and your users) will thank you.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0FN8F1KN3
• ISBN13: 9798299063387
• Release Date: August 2025
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 194 Pages
• Weight: 0.76 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 7.0" x 10.0"