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Bosun Trainer

Private corporate batches, live online cohorts and 1-on-1 mentoring in expression-based alerting with rules you can back-test against historical data before you deploy them — taught by a practitioner who runs it in production.

20 years across DevOps, SRE and Security · 10,000+ engineers trained · Trained teams at JPMorgan Chase, Verizon, Nokia and the World Bank

DeliveryOnline · Onsite · Hybrid
FormatsCorporate · 1-on-1 · Cohort
AgendaCustomisable
Batch size8–30 engineers
Engineers we've trained work at
JPMorgan ChaseBank of AmericaWells FargoVerizonNokiaWorld BankGE HealthcareVMwareOracleQualcommMercedes-BenzAirbusDatadogSplunkDeloitteInfosysWiproCapgemini
# who teaches it

Your Bosun trainer

Rajesh Kumar

Principal DevOps Engineer & Architect

SRE practiceObservability designIncident response20 years in productionPrincipal / architect roles10,000+ engineers trainedM.Tech BITS Pilani25+ certifications

Rajesh teaches Bosun as an alerting discipline rather than a UI tour — the expression language and its type system, reduction functions, band and shiftBand comparisons against historical windows, alias and joins across tag sets, and the depends and squelch mechanisms that stop one failure producing forty pages. Sessions cover the operational reality of an inherited deployment: scollector configuration and custom collectors, the incident lifecycle and notification chains, unknown-state handling, back-testing rules against real historical data before they ship, and a documented migration path from a Bosun rule set to Prometheus recording rules and Alertmanager routing.

Twenty years across DevOps, SRE and Security, in principal and architect roles at PayPay, SoftwareAG, ServiceNow, JDA Software, Intuit, Adobe and others. He has trained engineers at JPMorgan Chase, Verizon, Nokia, the World Bank, VMware, Oracle, Mercedes-Benz and Airbus — more than 10,000 people personally. He teaches what he runs, not what he reads.

One practitioner, not a bench

You are booked with a named engineer, and that is who turns up. Marketplaces and larger providers rotate whoever is free, so the person who sold you the agenda is rarely the person teaching it.

The same trainer is available for the next engagement, which matters when a team builds on what it learned last time.

18,000+certified learners
500+corporate batches delivered
50+countries served
100+certification programmes
# faculty

Who delivers Bosun engagements

Your batch is assigned a named trainer before it starts, and that is who teaches it. See the full faculty.

How your Bosun trainer is chosen

Engagements are matched on the tool, not the calendar. For Bosun that means a trainer who has run it in production — expression-based alerting with rules you can back-test against historical data before you deploy them — rather than whoever is free that week. You are told who is teaching before you commit, and that person is on the discovery call that shapes the agenda.

Where a batch is large enough to need a second trainer, the pairing is declared up front. The lead trainer stays accountable for the syllabus and the assessment either way.

Rajesh Kumar

Principal DevOps Engineer & Architect

India20 yrsLead trainer

Twenty years across DevOps, SRE and Security in principal and architect roles at PayPay, SoftwareAG, ServiceNow, JDA Software, Intuit, Adobe, IBM/Emptoris, Ness, MindTree and Accenture. He has trained more than 10,000 engineers personally, at organisations including JPMorgan Chase, Verizon, Nokia, the World Bank, VMware, Oracle, Mercedes-Benz and Airbus. He teaches what he runs, not what he reads.

Gaurav Aggarwal

IndiaInstructorCoach

Harsh Mehta

IndiaInstructorCoach

Kapil Gupta

IndiaInstructorCoach

Kunal Jain

IndiaInstructorCoach

Nikhil Gupta

IndiaInstructorCoach

Pranab Kumar

IndiaInstructorCoach

Rohit Ghatol

IndiaInstructorCoach

Amit Agarwal

IndiaInstructorCoach

Anil Kumar

IndiaInstructorCoach

Balachandran Anbalagan

IndiaInstructorCoach

Durga Prasad

IndiaInstructorCoach

# how to engage

Four ways to work with this trainer

Private corporate batch

Teams of 8–30

Custom agenda, your timezone, onsite or online, NDA-friendly.

Request a quote

1-on-1 mentoring

Individual engineers

A private instructor and a curriculum built around your goal.

₹99,999

Live & Interactive cohort

Individuals who want peers

Scheduled batch, max 8 to 10 hours of live instruction.

₹34,999

Self-paced video

Self-starters

Full LMS access — 20+ courses and 50+ tools included.

₹833/mo
# private batches

Private Bosun training for your team

A private batch starts with a discovery call. We look at the stack you actually run — the CI system, the cloud, the constraints — and map the agenda onto it, so examples use your topology rather than a generic one.

Delivery is onsite at your premises, live online, or hybrid, scheduled around your release calendar rather than ours. Batches run 8 to 30 engineers.

Every attendee leaves with recordings, slides, lab repositories and a completion certificate. You receive an attendance and assessment report. Invoicing supports PO and GST.

Talk to us about a private Bosun batch

What you provide vs what we bring

  • You: the room or the call, and the engineers
  • Us: trainer, agenda, labs, assessment, certificates
  • Labs: we guide your team through provisioning their own free-tier cloud environment — the skill goes with them
# the technology

What is Bosun?

Bosun is an open-source monitoring and alerting system written in Go and originally built by the Stack Exchange infrastructure team. It is not a metrics store: it sits on top of one and does the alerting. Bosun queries a time-series backend — OpenTSDB, Graphite, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch or Prometheus — evaluates alert rules written in its own expression language, and manages the resulting incidents through open, acknowledged and closed states with notification chains and escalations attached.

Two design decisions distinguish it. The first is the expression language, which treats a query as a typed value that can be reduced, aliased, joined and combined — so a rule can compare the last five minutes against the same window a week ago, or suppress an alert when a dependency is already firing, without shelling out to a script. The second is rule testing: Bosun's web interface lets you run an alert definition against historical data and see exactly which hosts would have paged and when, before the rule ever reaches production. Very few alerting systems let you back-test a threshold that way, and it is the reason teams still cite Bosun as an influence on how alerts should be authored.

Alongside the server, Bosun ships scollector, a metrics collection agent with built-in collectors for hosts, processes and common services, plus a metadata channel that tags metrics with descriptions and units. Bosun is a niche tool with a small installed base, and its upstream development has largely stopped — most engineers who need it today are maintaining an inherited deployment or planning a move off it, and this training is built around both of those realities.

Why this skill matters now

Bosun's practical relevance is honest and narrow. It is not a growth technology, and nobody should adopt it for a greenfield estate today — Prometheus with Alertmanager, or a commercial platform, is the sensible default. But a real number of infrastructure teams inherited a working Bosun installation, and it usually sits on the alerting path for systems that matter, which means somebody has to be able to read the rules, change a threshold safely, and keep scollector and the backend healthy.

There is a second reason to learn it, and it outlives the tool. Bosun's model — typed expressions over time series, dependency-aware suppression, unknown-state handling, and back-testing a rule against history before deploying it — is a more rigorous way of thinking about alerting than most teams practise. Engineers who learn it write better Prometheus rules afterwards, because they stop treating a threshold as a guess.

So this training serves two outcomes: operate and safely modify an existing Bosun deployment, and, where the decision has been made, migrate its rule set to a supported stack without losing coverage.

Bosun training
# outcomes

What your team can do afterwards

Read and modify an existing Bosun rule set with confidence about what each expression returns and when it fires
Write alert definitions using the Bosun expression language — q, band, over, reduction functions, alias and tag-set joins
Back-test a rule against historical data and choose a threshold from evidence rather than intuition
Control alert noise with dependencies, squelches, silences and correct unknown-state handling
Build notification templates and escalation chains that give responders something actionable rather than a metric name
Deploy and operate scollector, including built-in collectors, external collectors and metric metadata
Run Bosun in production: backend configuration, state persistence, backup, upgrades and failure recovery
Plan and execute a migration from Bosun to Prometheus and Alertmanager without dropping alert coverage
# curriculum

8 modules. Live demos in a real lab, not slides.

01Where Bosun fits, and an honest look at its positionLive & Interactive5 hrs · 2 assignments · 1 capstone

What Bosun is and, just as importantly, what it is not. The separation between metric storage and alerting, how Bosun compares to Nagios, Prometheus with Alertmanager and commercial platforms, and a frank assessment of its upstream maintenance status so decisions about keeping or replacing it are informed.

Topics: Monitoring, alerting and the difference between them · Bosun architecture: server, backend and collection agent · Supported backends: OpenTSDB, Graphite, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, Prometheus · Bosun compared with Nagios, Icinga and Prometheus/Alertmanager · Upstream maintenance status and what it means operationally · Deciding to keep, freeze or migrate an existing deployment

  • Assignments: (1) Inventory an existing Bosun deployment: backends, rule count, notification targets; (2) Write a short keep-or-migrate assessment for a real estate
  • Capstone: Produce a decision record recommending whether a given Bosun installation should be maintained, frozen or migrated
02Deploying Bosun and its data backendLive & Interactive5 hrs · 2 assignments · 1 capstone

Standing up a working environment from nothing so the rest of the course has somewhere to run. Installing the Bosun binary, choosing and configuring a time-series backend, the layout of bosun.conf and the rule configuration, and the state store that holds incidents and silences.

Topics: Installing Bosun and running it under systemd or Docker · Configuring OpenTSDB, Graphite, InfluxDB or Elasticsearch as a backend · bosun.conf structure: backend, SMTP, authentication, paths · Rule configuration files and reloading them safely · The internal state store, and what is lost if it is lost · Web interface tour: dashboard, expression editor, rule editor, items

  • Assignments: (1) Stand up Bosun against a time-series backend and confirm data is queryable; (2) Reload a rule change without losing open incident state
  • Capstone: Build a reproducible Bosun lab environment with a backend and live metrics that you keep for the rest of the course
03Collecting metrics with scollectorLive & Interactive5 hrs · 2 assignments · 1 capstone

Getting data in. scollector's built-in collectors for host, process, disk and service metrics, how tags and metric metadata work, writing external collectors in any language, and the practical questions of collection interval, cardinality and what not to collect.

Topics: scollector installation, configuration and service management · Built-in collectors: host, process, disk, network and service checks · Tags, tag cardinality and naming conventions · Metric metadata: descriptions, rate types and units · External collectors and the collector output format · Process monitoring and custom application metrics · Collection interval, batching and backend load

  • Assignments: (1) Deploy scollector across the lab hosts and verify metrics reach the backend; (2) Write an external collector that exposes an application-specific metric
  • Capstone: Instrument a small service estate end to end with scollector, including one custom collector and correct metadata
04The Bosun expression languageLive & Interactive5 hrs · 2 assignments · 1 capstone

The heart of the tool and the reason to learn it. Bosun expressions are typed — series, number sets, scalars — and most confusion comes from mixing them. This module works through the type system, querying, reduction, and the operations that let one expression compare now against last week.

Topics: The type system: seriesSet, numberSet, scalar and how they convert · Querying with q, and duration syntax · Reduction functions: avg, min, max, median, percentile, dev, last, first · band, shiftBand and over for historical comparison · alias, rename and t for tag-set manipulation · Joins and operators across differing tag sets · ungroup, nv and handling missing data · Working iteratively in the expression editor

  • Assignments: (1) Write an expression that compares the last hour against the same hour a week ago; (2) Fix five expressions that fail because of type or tag-set mismatches
  • Capstone: Build a library of ten reusable expressions covering saturation, error rate, latency and anomaly comparison
05Alert definitions, templates and macrosLive & Interactive5 hrs · 2 assignments · 1 capstone

Turning expressions into alerts people can act on. Alert blocks with warn and crit conditions, the variables that feed a notification, Go templates that render context rather than a bare metric name, and macros and lookup tables that keep a large rule set from repeating itself.

Topics: Alert definition structure: warn, crit, and their thresholds · Template blocks: subject, body and the Go template context · Including graphs, tables and links in notifications · Macros for shared alert boilerplate · Lookup tables for per-host and per-service thresholds · Alert variables and computed values · Writing an alert that tells the responder what to do next

  • Assignments: (1) Rewrite a bare-threshold alert so the notification includes cause, context and a runbook link; (2) Replace duplicated alert blocks with a macro and a lookup table
  • Capstone: Author a complete alert set for one service with per-environment thresholds driven from lookup tables
06Noise control: dependencies, unknowns, squelch and silencesLive & Interactive5 hrs · 2 assignments · 1 capstone

The difference between a monitoring system and a pager that gets ignored. Dependency-aware suppression so a failed switch does not page for fifty hosts, correct handling of the unknown state when data stops arriving, squelch rules, and silences during planned work.

Topics: The depends keyword and dependency-aware suppression · Unknown state: what it means and why ignoring it hides outages · unknownIsNormal and per-alert unknown handling · Squelch rules for excluding known-noisy tag sets · Silences: scope, duration and the audit trail · Flapping, hysteresis and choosing evaluation windows · Auditing an existing rule set for alerts nobody acts on

  • Assignments: (1) Add dependencies so a host-down alert suppresses its service alerts; (2) Silence a tag set for a maintenance window and verify the suppression
  • Capstone: Take a noisy production-like rule set and cut its notification volume substantially without losing real coverage
07Notifications, incident lifecycle and rule testingLive & Interactive5 hrs · 2 assignments · 1 capstone

How an alert becomes an incident and reaches a human. Notification definitions, email and HTTP POST targets, chained notifications with escalation timeouts, the acknowledge, close and forget lifecycle — then the feature that sets Bosun apart, testing a rule against historical data before it ships.

Topics: Notification blocks: email, HTTP POST and chained notifications · Escalation with timeout and next · Incident lifecycle: open, acknowledged, closed, forgotten · The dashboard and item views for on-call use · Integrating with paging and chat systems over HTTP · Rule testing against historical data with the rule editor · Choosing thresholds from back-tested evidence · Reviewing what a rule change would have done last month

  • Assignments: (1) Build a two-stage escalation chain with a timeout and verify it fires; (2) Back-test a proposed threshold change over 30 days of history
  • Capstone: Ship a new alert rule that has been back-tested against a real incident window and produces exactly one actionable page
08Operating Bosun, and migrating off itLive & Interactive5 hrs · 2 assignments · 1 capstone

Keeping an inherited deployment healthy, and planning the exit when that is the right call. Backup and restore of rule and state data, upgrades, capacity and backend health, common failure modes — then a structured migration of the rule set to Prometheus recording and alerting rules with Alertmanager routing.

Topics: Backup and restore of configuration and incident state · Upgrades, configuration validation and safe rollback · Backend health, retention and query cost · Common failure modes: backend unreachable, rule evaluation lag, stuck unknowns · Access control and authentication options · Mapping Bosun expressions to PromQL · Mapping depends, squelch and templates to Alertmanager inhibition, silences and templates · Running both systems in parallel during cutover

  • Assignments: (1) Restore a Bosun deployment from backup into a clean host; (2) Translate five Bosun alerts into PromQL and Alertmanager rules
  • Capstone: Deliver a migration plan and working parallel-run proof that moves a Bosun rule set to Prometheus and Alertmanager without a coverage gap

Need this mapped to your stack?

We rebuild the agenda around the tools you actually run.

Request a custom agenda
# hands-on

Labs and capstones your engineers actually build

LAB · SETUP

Bosun and a backend from scratch

Install Bosun against a time-series backend, wire in scollector across three hosts, and confirm queries return live data from the expression editor.

installscollectorbackend
LAB · EXPRESSIONS

Ten expressions, one type system

Work through querying, reduction, banding and tag-set joins until the seriesSet-to-numberSet-to-scalar conversions are automatic, fixing deliberately broken expressions along the way.

expressionsbandalias
LAB · ALERTS

An alert a responder can act on

Author an alert with warn and crit thresholds from lookup tables and a template that renders cause, affected tag sets, a graph and a runbook link rather than a metric name.

alertstemplateslookups
LAB · NOISE

Cut the pager volume

Audit a deliberately noisy rule set, add dependencies, fix unknown handling, apply squelches, and demonstrate a large drop in notifications with no loss of real coverage.

dependsunknownsquelch
LAB · BACK-TEST

Prove a threshold before shipping it

Use the rule editor to replay a proposed alert over a month of historical data, count the pages it would have produced, and tune the threshold from that evidence.

rule testingthresholdshistory
CAPSTONE · MIGRATION

Bosun rule set to Prometheus and Alertmanager

Translate a complete Bosun rule set to PromQL and Alertmanager routing, map dependencies to inhibition rules, and run both systems in parallel to prove no coverage was lost.

prometheusalertmanagermigration
# ecosystem

The tools Bosun sits next to

OpenTSDB
Prometheus
Grafana
InfluxDB
Elasticsearch
Graphite
Alertmanager
Nagios
Icinga
Go
Linux
HBase

Who this is for

  • Infrastructure engineers who inherited a running Bosun deployment and must keep it healthy
  • SREs responsible for alert quality and on-call load
  • Monitoring and observability engineers evaluating or replacing a legacy alerting stack
  • System administrators maintaining OpenTSDB, Graphite or InfluxDB backends
  • Platform engineers planning a migration from Bosun to Prometheus and Alertmanager
  • On-call engineers who need to read and safely change existing alert rules

Pre-requisites

  • Comfortable on a Linux command line — services, logs, package management and systemd
  • Some prior exposure to any monitoring system, even a basic one
  • Basic understanding of time-series data: metrics, tags, aggregation windows
  • Ability to read configuration files and edit them safely under version control
  • Access to two or three hosts, VMs or free-tier cloud instances for labs
# pricing

Straightforward pricing

Every plan includes 1 year of full LMS access — not just this course, the entire DevOpsSchool LMS: 20+ courses, 50+ tools, videos, quizzes, assignments and projects.

Self-paced video

₹833/mo

Billed yearly at ₹9,996

Enroll now

1-on-1 mentorship

₹99,999

Full program, private instructor

Enroll 1-on-1

Corporate / private batch

8–30 engineers · custom agenda · onsite or online · PO and GST invoicing

Get a custom quote

Refunds. If we cancel or postpone a cohort, you get a full refund within 15 days. There is no money-back guarantee otherwise.

Terms. Course material remains licensed to the attendee. Read the terms.

Your data. We don't share it with third parties. Privacy policy.

Every attendee gets a verifiable certificate

  • Issued per attendee on completion
  • Verifiable at devopsschool.com/certificates
  • Hard copy available on request
  • Corporate batches receive an attendance and assessment report
DevOpsSchool

Bosun Training

Certificate of completion

# feedback

What engineers say

4.4 / 5 from 26 reviews on Trustpilot.

★★★★★
I recently did a SRE Session with Rajesh Kumar from DevOps School and the session was great. Right from 1st day till day 15, we had a very interactive session. Rajesh clarified our doubts and the tool demos were excellent without any hiccups. He simplified the concepts while sticking to the content with a fine balance between theory and practice. Am convinced he is one of the best trainers for SRE & DevOps concepts.
chandrasekaran j · Trustpilot
★★★★★
The trainer (Rajesh) provided very good sessions on SRE profession. Not only hands-on learning on the tools but also SRE mindset.
Peter Wang · Trustpilot
★★★★★
Very good training session. Well explained from the basics to the complex concepts. Also tried to cover practicals and demos within the 3 hour sessions. The learning content and videos are of a great deal of help.
Sreekanth Kannoth · Trustpilot
★★★★★
Basics explanation was exemplary from Rajesh where he dealt with complicated topics to be simple. Great learning stuff personally for me.
Krishna Mohan Yelleti · Trustpilot
★★★★★
Good discussion, helped us to understand different tools in SRE.
Prashant Saxena · Trustpilot
★★★★★
The Rundeck developer session was excellent and highly engaging. I appreciated how well the session was structured, with the theoretical concepts explained clearly and in simple terms. What stood out most to me was the demo — it was both informative and enjoyable. I especially liked how Rajesh walked us through not only the happy path but also the sad path, showcasing common issues and sharing practical troubleshooting tips.
Raimy Roy · Trustpilot
# comparison

Why a named practitioner beats a marketplace listing

What mattersYouTube + blogsGeneric online courseFreelance marketplaceDevOpsSchool
Named practitionerNoRarelyVaries per bookingYes — same trainer each time
Production experienceUnknownUnknownUnverified20 years, named employers
Custom agendaNoNoSometimesBuilt from your stack
Onsite deliveryNoNoSometimesYes
Lab environmentNoneSandbox that expiresVariesYour own cloud — skill goes with you
AssessmentNoneQuizRarelyAssignments + capstone per module
Per-attendee certificatesNoSometimesRarelyYes
Corporate invoicingNoLimitedVariesPO and GST
Post-training supportNoneForum, time-limitedNoneLifetime forum access
# questions

Frequently asked

Is Bosun still maintained?
Upstream development has largely stopped, and we say so plainly in the first module. That is exactly why the training is shaped around operating an inherited deployment safely and, where appropriate, migrating off it — rather than pitching Bosun for new adoption.
Should we adopt Bosun for a new environment?
Almost certainly not. For a greenfield estate, Prometheus with Alertmanager or a commercial platform is the sensible default. This course exists for teams who already run Bosun, or who want its rule-authoring discipline applied elsewhere.
Does the course include migrating to Prometheus?
Yes — the final module and the capstone are a structured migration: mapping Bosun expressions to PromQL, dependencies to Alertmanager inhibition rules, squelches to silences, and running both systems in parallel to prove coverage.
Which time-series backend do the labs use?
OpenTSDB by default, since that is the pairing Bosun was designed around. For a private batch we build the labs against whichever backend you actually run — Graphite, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch or Prometheus.
Is the expression language worth learning if we are leaving Bosun?
Yes. Its typed model, historical banding and dependency suppression are a more rigorous way to think about alerting, and engineers who learn it consistently write sharper Prometheus rules afterwards. That transfer is an explicit goal of the course.
Can the agenda be customised for our stack?
Yes — that is the normal case for a private batch. We start with a discovery call, look at your backend, rule set, notification targets and migration intent, and rebuild the module list around them. Examples then use your rules rather than generic ones.
Do you deliver onsite?
Yes. Private batches run onsite at your premises, live online, or hybrid. You provide the room and the engineers; we bring the trainer, agenda, labs, assessment and certificates.
What lab environment do we need?
Attendees provision their own environment — free-tier AWS, Azure or GCP, or local VMs — and we walk them through it. We deliberately do not hand out temporary sandboxes, because the environment they build is the one they keep.
How long does a private Bosun batch take?
Typically two to three days. Two days cover deployment, expressions, alerts and noise control; the third adds scollector depth, rule back-testing and the migration capstone.
What size are batches?
Private corporate batches run 8 to 30 engineers. Public Live & Interactive cohorts are capped at 10 so everyone gets time with the trainer.
Do attendees get a certificate?
Yes — every attendee receives a completion certificate, verifiable at devopsschool.com/certificates. Corporate batches also receive an attendance and assessment report.
What is your refund position?
If we cancel or postpone a cohort, you receive a full refund within 15 days. There is no general money-back guarantee, and GST and gateway fees are not refunded.

Still deciding?

Tell us the team, the stack and the timeline. You'll get a straight answer, not a sales sequence.

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# ready when you are

Book a Bosun trainer — or ask a question first.

  • No spam, no drip sequence
  • Syllabus in 60 seconds
  • A human reply within one business day

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