Book Review: DevOps Troubleshooting

Hello everyone and welcome back for another book review at woktime. Today’s edition is a short review of a short book called “DevOps Troubleshooting: Linux Server Best Practices”. Without further ado, below is the Table Of Contents

1. 1. Troubleshooting best practices

1. 1. Why is the server so slow? Running out of CPU, RAM and Disk I/O

1. 1. Why won’t the system boot? Solving boot problems

1. 1. Why can’t write to the disk? Solving full or corrupt disk issues

1. 1. Is the server down? Tracking down the source of network problems

1. 1. Why won’t the hostnames resolve? Solving DNS server issues

1. 1. Why didn’t my email go through? Tracing email problems

1. 1. Is the website down? Tracking down web server problems

1. 1. Why is the database slow? Tracking down database problems

1. It’s the hardware’s fault? Diagnosing common hardware problems

So let’s start at the title. “DevOps” can be an overloaded term – it means different things to different people and unfortunately an “according-to-Hoyle” definition does not exists. I belong in the train of thought that DevOps is more of a cultural movement within an organization than say, a specific job title, so the title of the book “DevOps troubleshooting” is meaningless (I would have strongly preferred the term “Linux Systems Troubleshooting”, as it would have been more accurate for reasons that I am going to explain below).
The author is clearly experienced within the realm of Linux administration and he attempts to cover a broad range of topics. The book is approximately 205 pages long, which means that it will never get too deep within a subject, opting instead to cover as many topics as possible. The writing style of the author is quite readable and he goes out of his way to explain things in relative detail and on the really plus side of the book, there are no glaring errors – proofreaders and the author really did went the extra mile to ensure that content was accurate in the vast number of examples this book is providing.
However, my gripe with the book is that the material covered is really basic. Granted, the intended audience is not a veteran system administrator or engineer – this book by its own admission is aimed towards developers or QA personnel that, owing to some definition of DevOps, are thrown into operational duties. The author makes an effort NOT to use random based troubleshooting, however a complete methodology is never introduced.
Overall, this is a well-written book that provides value to a non-operations member of a team doing operations or for a novice system administrator. Its small size makes it portable enough to be carried around as a level-1 reference, however for system level debugging there are better options out there (keep watching this space for the definite follow up on this sentence).