Conference Talk

The Business Value of Observability

This panel moves beyond the technical aspects of observabilty to examine the business case for adopting this new way of working. Observability can help teams lower their MTTR, lower change failure rates, and speed up time to delivery in production. How can you make a case to business stakeholders to prioritize observability adoption initiatives? Which outcomes should you expect and what practical hurdles will you hit along the way?

Conference Talk

Landing Observability in the Enterprise

John describes the key challenges teams need to overcome, and provides both specific and actionable advice to overcome those challenges. By listening to this talk, you'll learn techniques that empower you to assess whether the enterprise environment you're in is ready for observability and, if so, how to make the strongest possible case for observability to the right people.

Conference Talk

Stepping Our Way Into Resilient Services

Is it possible to discover unknown-unknowns proactively with Chaos Engineering? Where exactly is the intersection between intentionally breaking production services and discovering the multitude of ways they could be broken with observability? This is a short presentation that leaves plenty of time to have a real-time discussion with George Miranda, take audience questions, and explore practical steps you can take with your teams as you step your way toward improving service resilience.

Conference Talk

The Future of Observability

In 2018, Peter Alvaro joined us at o11ycon to deliver a visionary and thought-provoking talk around the problems we had yet to solve. In retrospect, he ended up painting a picture of the problems that ultimately defined a lot of the work that was done in the observability space for the next three years. In this session, Charity and Christine join Peter for a chat that digs into where observability might be headed for the next three years.

Conference Talk

o11ycon Keynote

Nora Jones and Charity Majors share their experience leading major movements shaping the future of shipping software. Nora Jones is CEO of Jeli, and former engineer at Netflix and Slack will share her research and experience with Chaos Engineering, human factors, and site reliability. Charity Majors is Honeycomb's CTO and co-founder, who pioneered Observability as a software practice for modern teams.

Conference Talk

Conditional Distributed Tracing

Distributed tracing is generally a binary affair—it's off or on. Either a trace is sampled or, according to a flag, it's not. Span placement is also assumed to be an "always-on" system where spans are always added if the trace is active. For general availability and service level objectives, this is usually good enough. But when we encounter problems, we need more. In this talk, we'll show you how to "turn up the dial" with detailed diagnostic spans and span events that are inserted using dynamic conditions.

Conference Talk

Driving Observability Adoption Forward as an Internal Champion... During a Pandemic

Josh from Amperity covers how they planned, strategized, and organized their observability tooling evaluation. Josh also shares how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted that evaluation. He covers the engineering outcomes they were aiming for, given Amperity's engineering structure, and the areas of focus that ultimately helped set them up for success.

Conference Talk

Killing Your Staging Environment

“But it worked in staging!” is the new “But it works in my machine!” Docker, Kubernetes, and friends have made it easier to create similar environments, but it is still impossible to create environments that are the same as production. Erwin goes over lessons learned and what is needed to be able to successfully kill your staging environment. SPOILER WARNING: One of those things is proper observability.

Conference Talk

Modernizing Availability Thinking at Babylon

Babylon has a vision to bring affordable and accessible healthcare to the world. A key part of that vision is having a highly available global platform for healthcare delivery that is a delight to use for both customers and clinicians. In this talk, Tom will cover their ongoing journey to adopt an alternative (or complementary) SLI & SLO-based approach, the advantages of that approach, what they've learned along the way, and what's left to do.

Conference Talk

OpenTelemetry, Not Just for Production Troubleshooting

In this talk, Michael will show you how to leverage OpenTelemetry to gather and analyze data from production and how to use it in pre-production workflows. Using OTel in pre-production can help developers troubleshoot microservices, validate their changes, and prevent issues before they get to production. By attending this talk, you'll learn how to use OpenTelemetry data to become proactive rather than reactive.

Conference Talk

Eyes Wide Open: o11y From Theory to Practice

Peter covers his team's journey, including how they did the early integration, included interactions with existing tooling that was available in their organization, and went through several 'aha moments' they encountered when they had instrumentation in place that proved valuable in uncovering problems in both their deployed environment and test suite.