Book Image

Real-World SRE

By : Pavlos Ratis, Nat Welch
Book Image

Real-World SRE

By: Pavlos Ratis, Nat Welch

Overview of this book

Real-World SRE is the go-to survival guide for the software developer in the middle of catastrophic website failure. Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) has emerged on the frontline as businesses strive to maximize uptime. This book is a step-by-step framework to follow when your website is down and the countdown is on to fix it. Nat Welch has battle-hardened experience in reliability engineering at some of the biggest outage-sensitive companies on the internet. Arm yourself with his tried-and-tested methods for monitoring modern web services, setting up alerts, and evaluating your incident response. Real-World SRE goes beyond just reacting to disaster—uncover the tools and strategies needed to safely test and release software, plan for long-term growth, and foresee future bottlenecks. Real-World SRE gives you the capability to set up your own robust plan of action to see you through a company-wide website crisis. The final chapter of Real-World SRE is dedicated to acing SRE interviews, either in getting a first job or a valued promotion.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Real-World SRE
Contributors
Preface
Other Books You May Enjoy
Index

Tools for watching the network


Now that you know some basics of how networking works, let's run through some quick introductions to some tools. Many of these tools are very powerful and have lots of options. Make sure to read their documentation to understand everything they can do. I will mainly be talking about one action you can use each tool for and will not provide an exhaustive list of their capabilities or possible uses.

netstat

netstat is a tool for evaluating the state of open connections on a Linux box. The tool can do a lot, but the main thing I use it for is to see which services are using which ports. I would suggest reading the man page for netstat by running man netstat. netstat can also list active outgoing connections and all sorts of cool stuff about your computer's active networking. Like every other tool in this book, though, read the documentation to find out lots of cool ways to use it.

The following example shows which ports are open on one of my computers. The mnemonic...