Now Available for Purchase!

Posted on by Leon

I am grateful to everyone who helped make this book a reality. I hope you’ll take a moment to check it out, and even purchase an ebook or print copy.

The details:

  • What’s it called? “The Four Questions Every Monitoring Engineer is Asked”
  • When can I buy it? NOW!!!
  • Did anyone help? OF COURSE! You can’t do this kind of thing alone.
  • What is it about? Keep reading…

Tell me more, tell me more

First, lets’ get the important stuff out of the way.

You can order the eBook on the following platforms:

If you’re old fashioned (or like reading on Shabbat and the chagim) you can purchase the print copy through Amazon, Barnes&Noble, and probably a few other online and physical stores as well if you look.

So what IS it about, anyway?

When you start “doing” monitoring, there are a few questions that you get asked over and over again. I came to think of them as “The Four Questions” (of monitoring), as a kind of inside joke reference to the Four Questions that are asked by the youngest person at the table during the Passover meal.

But after I made the joke, I realized that it was more true than I initially realized. In fact, I realized that there was a lot about Passover – the philosophy, the stories, and even the songs – that could be applied to monitoring and IT work in general.

That was the original idea for the book, and the title.

But every time I tell people about the book, I get MORE questions (which is is ironic because asking questions that lead to more questions is a very Jewish thing to have happen.) The two mains ones are:

  1. I like monitoring, but I don’t know (or like) anything about Judaism. Should I read this book?
    1. In short, yes you should. Not because Papa needs a new pair of shoes, but because A) It’s mostly about monitoring, with the philosophy added as “flavor” to keep you interested. And B) I’ve clearly separated the Jewish-themed content from the monitoring stuff so you can easily skip over it if it’s not your cup of tea.
  2. I like Judaism but I don’t know (or like) anything about monitoring. Am I going to understand ANY of this?
    1. Well, I can GUARANTEE that you’ll understand the Passover parts. And it can be a fascinating peek inside the world of IT – which is everywhere these days. So it couldn’t hurt, right?

With Gratitude

As I said at the start, nothing like this gets done “alone”. Along with every ounce of gratitude I cam muster for HaKadosh Baruch-Hu (God) and my family, I want to call out the amazing contributions of:

  • Rabbi Raphael Davidovich, who not only cheerled me through the project, but also offered some of the most key insights of the book by way of our regular conversations, his many shiruim (lectures), and when he invited my family and I to his table each Passover.
  • Yechiel Kalmenson, who graciously took time out of his regular work to use his combined expertise in both Talmudic knowledge and technology, programming, and IT to make sure I wasn’t just creating connections where there weren’t any.
  • Ann Guidry, editor extra-ordinaire, who painstakingly checked through my initial drafts to make me sound far more coherent than I otherwise would.
  • Rene Lego, for taking pictures of me that repeatedly show me off in a far better way than I normally look.
  • Rob Masek, who takes my incoherent ramblings about design ideas and turns them into something that is not only intelligible, but also visually pleasing.

I hope you’ll check it out and maybe even give it a read and tell me what you think in the comments below.