PromCon EU 2023 - Observability Recap in Berlin

As previously mentioned, last week I was on site at the PromCon EU 2023 event for two days in Berlin, Germany. 

This is a community organized event focused on the technology and implementations around the open source Prometheus project, including for example PromQL and PromLens.

Below you'll find an overview covering insights into the talks given, often with a short recap if you don't want to browse the details. Along with the talks it was invaluable to have the common discussions and chatting that happens between talks in the breaks where you can connect with core maintainers of various aspects of the Prometheus project.

Be sure to keep an eye on the event video playlist, as all sessions were recorded and will appear here.

Let's dive right in and see what the event had to offer this year in Berlin.

Cloud Native London Meetup - Cloud Native Bedtime Stories

I'm heading back to visit my good friends at the Cloud Native London meetup, having been given the opportunity to present again after my first visit in January of this year.

They have +7,000 members and it is, "...the official Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Meetup group dedicated to building a strong, open, diverse developer community around the Cloud Native platform and technologies in London." You can also find them on their own slack channel, so feel free to drop in for a quick chat if you like.

That session I presented in January was about the pitfalls everyone should avoid with cloud data and they live streamed it with a recording available online if you want to revisit.

Now let's take a look at what this meetup looks like on Wednesday, 4 Oct in London.

Infobip Shift Conference 2023 - 3 Pitfalls Everyone Should Avoid with Cloud Data (slides)

As I mentioned previously, I'm speaking today at this year's Shift Conference.

I was on stage to share some thoughts and insights into the 3 pitfalls I think everyone should be aware of and avoid with regards to their cloud data.

To ensure you can get your hands on the slides, I'm going to share them here.

Getting Started with Prometheus - Instrumenting Applications

Are you looking to get away from proprietary instrumentation? 

Are you interested in open source observability but lack the knowledge to just dive right in? 

This workshop is for you, designed to expand your knowledge and understanding of open source observability tooling that is available to you today.

Dive right into a free, online, self paced, hands-on workshop introducing you to Prometheus. Prometheus is an open source systems monitoring and alerting tool kit that enables you to hit the ground running with discovering, collecting, and querying your observability today. Over the course of this workshop you will learn what Prometheus is, what it is not, install it, start collecting metrics, and learn all the things you need to know to become effective at running Prometheus in your observability stack. 

Previously, I shared an introduction to Prometheus, installing Prometheus, an introduction to the query language, exploring basic queries, using advanced queries, relabeling metrics in Prometheus, and discovering service targets as free online labs. In this article you'll learn all about instrumenting your applications using Prometheus client libraries.

SRECon EU 2023 - The road to Dublin

"SREcon23 Europe/Middle East/Africa is a gathering of engineers who care deeply about site reliability, systems engineering, and working with complex distributed systems at scale. SREcon strives to challenge both those new to the profession as well as those who have been involved in it for decades. The conference has a culture of critical thought, deep technical insights, continuous improvement, and innovation."

This is SRECon23 EU and with it being in Dublin from 10-12 Oct this year, I couldn't resist submitting a few of my cloud native observability ideas. They had the entire spectrum of session types, including lightning talks, so I pushed in a few for each category.

The final selection was just last week and they seem keen to see one of my lightning talks. Let's see what they found to be the most interesting idea I pushed in for their call for papers.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA - Roadmap to Becoming a CNCF Ambassador

This year the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is hosting it's bi-annual event KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA in Chicago from 6-9 November 2023.

I continue to submit to both the EU and NA editions, with varying success to date. This year was no different and I submitted two sessions. 

The first was a workshop / tutorial type of session and the second was a bit of an outlier where I teamed up with a surprise co-speaker.

The schedule was posted this last week and one of my sessions was accepted, so let's see what I submitted and what will be on the schedule in Chicago in November.

All Things Open 2023 - Terrifying Execs into Action

I've always been a regular visitor to the All Things Open conferences, as they have a rock start organization since they started and put on a great annual event in the city of Raleigh, NC.

That being said, I've not been in attendance since 2018 when I gave a main stage lighting talk that was recorded. The reason for the break is pretty obvious and now that the event is back on in person, I was all in on the call for papers.

The selection committee was kind enough to select one of my favorite topics that I've been working on to address different audiences, but that helps you personally tell your stories effectively and move people to action.

Let's look at the abstract and details of my session for All Things Open in October.

Getting Started with Prometheus - Discovering Service Targets

Are you looking to get away from proprietary instrumentation? 

Are you interested in open source observability but lack the knowledge to just dive right in? 

This workshop is for you, designed to expand your knowledge and understanding of open source observability tooling that is available to you today.

Dive right into a free, online, self paced, hands-on workshop introducing you to Prometheus. Prometheus is an open source systems monitoring and alerting tool kit that enables you to hit the ground running with discovering, collecting, and querying your observability today. Over the course of this workshop you will learn what Prometheus is, what it is not, install it, start collecting metrics, and learn all the things you need to know to become effective at running Prometheus in your observability stack. 

Previously, I shared an introduction to Prometheus, installing Prometheus, an introduction to the query language, exploring basic queries, using advanced queries, and relabeling metrics in Prometheus as free online labs. In this article you'll learn all about discovering service targets in Prometheus.

DataOps Day 2023 - Optimizing Observability Spend: Metrics (slides)

As previously posted, I presented at the DataOps Day event on 16 Aug. 

The entire day was focused on a deep dive into the world of data and DataOps. Register for free to join this online event (or to browse the post-event recordings) and hear from data and business leaders who have adopted DataOps to achieve their goals for quality, security and speed.

I'm sharing some insights into the need for organizations to understand and adopt the Observability Data Optimization Cycle to survive the crush of cloud native observability data coming at them.

To gain some insights, let's take a look at the details of my session and explore the slides.

KCD Denmark - The first ever Kubernetes Community Days in Denmark

When I saw that they were going to host the first ever Kubernetes Community Days (KCD) in Denmark on 14 November, I had to apply.

It is a pretty active CNCF community that organizes many KCD events throughout the year across the globe and being a CNCF Ambassador I am always trying to support what my schedule will allow.

It was even more exciting to see that this KCD has offered slots for workshop content, where 25 attendees get to sit down in a room and go diving into hands-on content around CNCF projects. I had to try this out and submit one of my workshops.

PromCon EU 2023 - Heading to Berlin with Dashboards and Compliance

This year PromCon EU is being held in Berlin, Germany on Sep 28-29. It will be my second edition and I'm looking forward to the two days of all things Prometheus and cloud native observability.

I've yet to speak at one of these events, but this time around I wanted to share two different sessions, one is a lightning talk introduction to a workshop I've put together. The second one is a regular talk on the topic of the Prometheus Compliance Program which I've spent some time digging into to validate my employers compliance with the standards. 

I think they are good topics to share and help others getting started with these areas of Prometheus and integration with Prometheus.

Infobip Shift Conference 2023 - 3 Pitfalls Everyone Should Avoid with Cloud Data

Back in 2018 I was exposed for the first time to an amazing conference then known as Shift Developer Conference. It was an amazing location in Split, Croatia and one of the founders, Ivan Burazin quickly became a good friend.

I spoke on the main stage which was hosted in the Croatian National Opera House, something that remains both a special experience and was recorded. 

I've stayed in contact with Ivan over the years and wanted to return, but pandemics and other events kept me away, until this year. I bumped into Ivan at last year's KubeCon NA in Detroit, MA and while catching up on his activities he encouraged me to submit some talks right away.

So I did.

This year's Shift Conference is from 18-19 Sep and word on the street is that they are looking at around 5000 attendees. Below you will find the outline of my talk. 

DataOps Day 2023 - Optimizing Observability Spend: Metrics (accepted)

On August 16, from 09:00 - 15:00 ET, Techstrong is putting on a free virtual event called DataOps Day 2023 and I've been invited to share insights into optimizing your cloud native observability spend. 

As they state on the event site in the introduction, data is the crown jewels of an organization, empowering companies to make informed business decisions, improve operations, reduce costs and increase revenue. Organizations are increasingly adopting DataOps to get full visibility and control of their data pipeline, boost efficiency and quality of data, fuel digital transformation initiatives and maximize business value.

At DataOps Day, you'll be able to take a deep dive into the world of data and DataOps. Register for free to join this online event to hear from data and business leaders who have adopted DataOps to achieve their goals for quality, security and speed.

Let's take a look at the details of my session.

O11y Architecture - Financial Calculations Example

Cloud native technology has been changing the way payment services are architected. In 2020 I presented a series with insights from real implementations adopting open source and cloud native technology to modernize payment services. 

The series consisted of six articles and covered architectural diagrams from logical, schematic, to detailed views of the various  use cases uncovered. 

The architectures presented were based on open source cloud native technologies, such as containers, microservices, and a Kubernetes based container platform. The major omission in this series was to avoid discussing any aspect of cloud native observability. This series will take a look at fixing that omission with an open source standards based cloud native observability platform that helps DevOps teams control the speed, scale, and complexity of a cloud native world for their financial payments architecture.

The part one introduction covered the baseline architecture, defined the payments project, and shared the planning for this series in adding observability to the logical and physical architectures. Part two explored the common architectural elements needed when adding cloud native observability to your financial payments solutions. Part three discussed a physical architecture view of a financial payments example sharing insights into how to deploy your cloud native observability at scale. 

In this article we'll walk through a financial calculations physical architecture, exploring how to add scalable cloud native observability and laying out the various deployment options you have for your financial calculations observability solution.

O11y Guide - Without Observability It's Just Code

Welcome to another chapter in the ongoing series I started covering my journey into the world of cloud native observability. If you missed any of the previous articles, head on back to the introduction for a quick update.

After laying out the groundwork for this series in the initial article, I spent time sharing who the observability players are, looked at the ongoing discussion around monitoring pillars versus phases,  and shared thoughts on architectural level choices being made, and shared the open standards available within the open source landscape. I continued onwards with a few of the architectural challenges you might encounter when older monolithic applications and monitoring tools are still part of an organization's infrastructure landscape. Finally, I walked you through the open source visualization and dashboard project called Perses by introducing my hands-on workshop.

Being a developer from my early days in IT, it's been very interesting to explore the complexities of cloud native o11y. Monitoring applications goes way beyond just writing and deploying code, especially in the cloud native world. One thing remains the same, maintaining your organization's architecture always requires that you understand that without observability, it's just code you are deploying.

Let's look at what makes cloud native observability so crucial to your organization's success.

O11y Architecture - Financial Payments Example

Cloud native technology has been changing the way payment services are architected. In 2020 I presented a series with insights from real implementations adopting open source and cloud native technology to modernize payment services. 

The series consisted of six articles and covered architectural diagrams from logical, schematic, to detailed views of the various  use cases uncovered. 

The architectures presented were based on open source cloud native technologies, such as containers, microservices, and a Kubernetes based container platform. The major omission in this series was to avoid discussing any aspect of cloud native observability. This series will take a look at fixing that omission with an open source standards based cloud native observability platform that helps DevOps teams control the speed, scale, and complexity of a cloud native world for their financial payments architecture.

The part one introduction covered the baseline architecture, defined the payments project, and shared the planning for this series in adding observability to the logical and physical architectures. Part two explored the common architectural elements needed when adding cloud native observability to your financial payments solutions. In this article we'll walk through a financial payments physical architecture, exploring how to add scalable cloud native observability and laying out the various deployment options you have for your payments observability solution.

Getting Started with Prometheus - Relabeling Metrics in Prometheus

Are you looking to get away from proprietary instrumentation? 

Are you interested in open source observability but lack the knowledge to just dive right in? 

This workshop is for you, designed to expand your knowledge and understanding of open source observability tooling that is available to you today.

Dive right into a free, online, self paced, hands-on workshop introducing you to Prometheus. Prometheus is an open source systems monitoring and alerting tool kit that enables you to hit the ground running with discovering, collecting, and querying your observability today. Over the course of this workshop you will learn what Prometheus is, what it is not, install it, start collecting metrics, and learn all the things you need to know to become effective at running Prometheus in your observability stack. 

Previously, I shared an introduction to Prometheus, installing Prometheus, an introduction to the query language, exploring basic queries, and using advanced queries as free online worksop labs. In this article you'll continue your journey with relabeling metrics in Prometheus.

Open Source Edinburgh Meetup - Getting Started with Prometheus Workshop (video)

Last month I was in Edinburgh speaking at the Open Source Edinburgh Meetup about how to get started with Prometheus.

I shared my getting started with Prometheus workshop, which I've been working on for months now, and with a good turnout this group was perfect to test how the workshop lands with new observability engineers.

We were in the offices of Scott Logic (just down the hill from Edinburgh Castle) and below you'll find the agenda, the abstract, and the video recording of my session.

O11y Architecture - Financial Payments Common Observability Elements

Cloud native technology has been changing the way payment services are architected. In 2020 I presented a series with insights from real implementations adopting open source and cloud native technology to modernize payment services. 

The series consisted of six articles and covered architectural diagrams from logical, schematic, to detailed views of the various  use cases uncovered. 

The architectures presented were based on open source cloud native technologies, such as containers, microservices, and a Kubernetes based container platform. The major omission in this series was to avoid discussing any aspect of cloud native observability. This series will take a look at fixing that omission with an open source standards based cloud native observability platform that helps DevOps teams control the speed, scale, and complexity of a cloud native world for their financial payments architecture.

The part one introduction covered the baseline architecture, defined the payments project, and shared the planning for this series in adding observability to the logical and physical architectures. In this article we'll explore the logical diagram that captures the elements of a successful payments solution.

O11y Architecture - Financial Payments Introduction

Back in September 2020 I was researching open source architectures, meaning looking at several customer solutions from my employer at the time and developing a generic view of these solutions for certain use cases.

One of the use cases is known as financial payments and back in 2020 I kicked off a series covering this architecture with the article Payments architecture - An introduction. The series consisted of six articles and covered architectural diagrams from logical, schematic, to detailed views of the various  use cases we uncovered. 

The architectures presented were based on open source cloud native technologies, such as containers, microservices, and a Kubernetes based container platform. The major omission in this series was to avoid discussing any aspect of cloud native observability. 

This series will take a look at fixing that omission with an open source standards based cloud native observability platform that helps DevOps teams control the speed, scale, and complexity of a cloud native world for their financial payments architecture.

KCD Czech & Slovak 2023: Engaging Your Execs - Telling Great Observability Tales Inspiring Action (slides + video)

Today I spoke at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Kubernetes Community Day (KCD) in Bratislava,Slovakia.

I've been to Bratislava in the past to keynote for another conference at the same location and was deeply impressed with the depth of knowledge walking around that university. 

 

I want to share the slides from my talk along with the abstract, so see below for both. The session was also recorded so will be sharing that when available too.

Techie Brekkie Bristol Meetup - Observability for you and me with OpenTelemetry

Over the last few weeks I've been put in contact with the Techie Brekkie Bristol meetup group who were looking for a speaker for this month. 

I'm always up for something new and this is the very first time I'll be presenting to a breakfast group in the early morning. 

After a few back and forth through email, I met with the organization. I gave them a list of possible topics that might be of interest from our active collection of talks and they have selected one.

I'll be there in Bristol, UK on the morning of 31 May 2023 to present the talk that covers getting started with OpenTelemetry for your tracing needs.

WTF is SRE 2023 - Telling Effective Tales About Production (slides + recording)

Spent this week in London at the WTF is SRE 2023 conference sharing some thoughts on how to tell more effective tales in your organization of effect change. 

It was the fourth edition of this event and they  pulled together four tracks; Observability, Reliability, DevEx and DevSecOps. 

You must be asking the same thing I was when I first saw this conference, what is WTF is SRE? Well as they say on their site, "It is a highly-rated, very-tweeted-about, ridiculously-fun, wildly-insightful two-day conference designed to improve the world of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)."

As you can tell from the tone and style, these have got to be some really fun people to hang out with for a few days, so here's my thoughts and the slides from my talk.

Getting Started with Prometheus - Using Advanced Queries

Are you looking to get away from proprietary instrumentation? 

Are you interested in open source observability but lack the knowledge to just dive right in? 

This workshop is for you, designed to expand your knowledge and understanding of open source observability tooling that is available to you today.

Dive right into a free, online, self paced, hands-on workshop introducing you to Prometheus. Prometheus is an open source systems monitoring and alerting tool kit that enables you to hit the ground running with discovering, collecting, and querying your observability today. Over the course of this workshop you will learn what Prometheus is, what it is not, install it, start collecting metrics, and learn all the things you need to know to become effective at running Prometheus in your observability stack. 

Previously, I shared an introduction to Prometheus, installing Prometheus, an introduction to the query language, and exploring basic queries as free online worksop labs. In this article you'll continue your journey using advanced Prometheus queries with PromQL .

Open Source Edinburgh Meetup - Getting Started with Prometheus Workshop

Next month I'm heading back to Edinburgh to speak at the Open Source Edinburgh Meetup about how to get started with Prometheus.

With over 700 members, this group is spot on for the topic I'm presenting. Sharing the open source cloud native observability tooling and how to get started with it should resonate well with this audience. 

On 11 May 2023 I'll be at the offices of Scott Logic (just down the hill from Edinburgh Castle) and the meetup details where placed online this week.

Google Lightning Talk - Optimizing Observability Spend: Metrics

Today on day 1 of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon I was asked to speak in a lighting talk slot at the Google booth. 

The topic was, of course one that is on the lips of everyone here at the event, how can I save on costs?

I thought it would be interesting to share my observations on how you can optimize your observability spend in this rather chaotic cloud native world.

Below you'll find the slides I presented, and a short abstract of the talk.

KubeCon EU - Summary of Observability Day Europe

Yesterday kicked off the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event with a slew of off-site events. I dropped in on Observability Day Europe and wanted to share a few things I found interesting. 

This event was setup to foster collaboration, discussion, and knowledge sharing of cloud-native observability projects (including but not necessarily limited to Prometheus, Fluentd, Fluent Bit, OpenTelemetry, and OpenMetrics), as well as vendor-neutral best practices for addressing observability challenges. It was intended both for audiences that are new to observability as well as for seasoned practitioners. Observability Day enabled you to spend a day peeking under the hood of major Cloud Native Computing Foundation observability-related projects and broadening your knowledge of observability.

We were on-site in Amsterdam at the RAI conference center. The full schedule for Observability Day is available online but wanted to share an overview impression of what it was like to be there.

The day is centered around all the CNCF projects related to open observability and is full of both vendors and project focused talks.

Cloud Native Rejekts 2023 - Observability For You and Me with OpenTelemetry

The Cloud Native Rejekts 2023 is a fun event that is playing off of the main event later in the week, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Eu. Basically, if your talk was rejected, you can give it here!

This is a bit of a different article than normal in that I was not planning to present at the Cloud Native Rejekts event, but due to late minute cancellation of a speaker on my team, I was slotted in.

The session will be a talk on observability and the open source community project known as OpenTelemetry, a basic introduction to the concepts and technology..

The talk was originally to be given by Paige Cruz, but she's unable to attend so I'm filling her slot. As promised in my talk, the slides are provided below along with the session abstract.

Open Source 101 2023 - Observability For You and Me with OpenTelemetry (video)

As mentioned previously, I spoke at the Open Source 101 series conference in Charlotte, NC on 23 March 2023 and shared my slides from the presentation in that article.

It was a nice introductory session for all of us that are looking at open source tracing solutions within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) projects, and specifically to the project called OpenTelemetry.

As promised in my talk, the recording is provided below along with the session abstract.

Getting Started With Prometheus - Exploring Basic Queries

 Are you looking to get away from proprietary instrumentation? 

Are you interested in open source observability but lack the knowledge to just dive right in? 

This workshop is for you, designed to expand your knowledge and understanding of open source observability tooling that is available to you today.

Dive right into a free, online, self paced, hands-on workshop introducing you to Prometheus. Prometheus is an open source systems monitoring and alerting tool kit that enables you to hit the ground running with discovering, collecting, and querying your observability today. Over the course of this workshop you will learn what Prometheus is, what it is not, install it, start collecting metrics, and learn all the things you need to know to become effective at running Prometheus in your observability stack. 

Previously, I shared an introduction to Prometheus, installing Prometheus, and introduction to the query language as free online worksop labs. In this article you'll continue your journey exploring  basic Prometheus queries using PromQL.

KCD Czech & Slovak 2023 - Telling Great Observability Tales Inspiring Action

Next month the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is organizing the Kubernetes Community Day (KCD) in Bratislava,Slovakia. 

I've been to Bratislava in the past to keynote for another conference at the same location and was deeply impressed with the depth of knowledge walking around that university. 

On 19-21 May 2023 the KCD Czech & Slovak 2023 will take place in Bratislava and their call for papers went out at the beginning of the year. I was excited to be able to submit a few talks and even more excited to have the following accepted.

Getting Started With Prometheus - Introduction to the Query Language

Are you looking to get away from proprietary instrumentation? 

Are you interested in open source observability but lack the knowledge to just dive right in? 

This workshop is for you, designed to expand your knowledge and understanding of open source observability tooling that is available to you today.

Dive right into a free, online, self paced, hands-on workshop introducing you to Prometheus. Prometheus is an open source systems monitoring and alerting tool kit that enables you to hit the ground running with discovering, collecting, and querying your observability today. Over the course of this workshop you will learn what Prometheus is, what it is not, install it, start collecting metrics, and learn all the things you need to know to become effective at running Prometheus in your observability stack. 

Previously, I shared an introduction to Prometheus and installing Prometheus as free online worksop labs. In this article you'll continue your journey with an introduction to the Prometheus query language, also known as PromQL.

Open Source 101 2023 - Observability For You and Me with OpenTelemetry (slides)

 As mentioned previously, I submitted the Open Source 101 series conference being hosted in Charlotte, NC on 23 March 2023.

Interestingly enough, they picked up a talk on observability and the open source community project known as OpenTelemetry.

I was to give this talk with a co-speaker Paige Cruz, but she's going to be on the West Coast speaking at three other events during this same time period, so I'm flying solo.

As promised in my talk, the slides are provided below along with the session abstract.

Getting Started With Prometheus - Installing Prometheus

Are you looking to get away from proprietary instrumentation? 

Are you interested in open source observability but lack the knowledge to just dive right in? 

This workshop is for you, designed to expand your knowledge and understanding of open source observability tooling that is available to you today.

Dive right into a free, online, self paced, hands-on workshop introducing you to Prometheus. Prometheus is an open source systems monitoring and alerting tool kit that enables you to hit the ground running with discovering, collecting, and querying your observability today. Over the course of this workshop you will learn what Prometheus is, what it is not, install it, start collecting metrics, and learn all the things you need to know to become effective at running Prometheus in your observability stack. 

Previously I shared an introduction to Prometheus in a lab that kicked off this workshop. In this article you'll be installing Prometheus, from either a pre-built binary from the project or using a container image.

Open Source 101 2023 - Observability For You and Me with OpenTelemetry

As mentioned previously, I submitted the Open Source 101 series conference being hosted in Charlotte, NC on 23 March 2023.

Interestingly enough, they picked up a talk on observability and the open source community project known as OpenTelemetry.

I was to give this talk with a co-speaker Paige Cruz, but she's going to be on the West Coast speaking at three other events during this same time period, so I'm flying solo.

Let's see what the story is about, shall we?

The Ultimate Beginners Guide to Rules and Processes

As seen online at KieLive episode #14

There are so many ways and so much content out there to get you started with open source rules and process automation tooling by Red Hat, so where do you start? 

The goal of this guide is to provide you with a learning path through this content as a way to get started from download, to installation, to quick starts, to hands-on workshops, and all the way to using this technology for your cloud-native development projects.

You'll walk away from this guide with a learning path mapped out through content that's enjoyable to work with and can help you get started on your rules and process automation projects today.

Getting Started With Prometheus - Introduction to Prometheus

Are you looking to get away from proprietary instrumentation? 

Are you interested in open source observability but lack the knowledge to just dive right in? 

This workshop is for you, designed to expand your knowledge and understanding of open source observability tooling that is available to you today.

Dive right into a free, online, self paced, hands-on workshop introducing you to Prometheus. Prometheus is an open source systems monitoring and alerting tool kit that enables you to hit the ground running with discovering, collecting, and querying your observability today. Over the course of this workshop you will learn what Prometheus is, what it is not, install it, start collecting metrics, and learn all the things you need to know to become effective at running Prometheus in your observability stack. 

In this article you'll be introduced to some basic concepts, learn what Prometheus is and what it is not before you start getting hands on with it in the rest of the workshop.

O11y Guide - Building Advanced++ Dashboards

The ongoing series covering my journey into the world of cloud native observability continues in this article, where I'm continuing to explore an open source dashboard and visualization project. If you missed any of the previous articles, head on back to the introduction for a quick update.

After laying out the groundwork for this series in the initial article, I spent some time in the second article sharing who the observability players are. I also discussed the teams that these players are on in this world of cloud native o11y. For the third article I looked at the ongoing discussion around monitoring pillars versus phases. In the fourth article I talked about keeping your options open with open source standards. My last installment, the fifth article in this series, I talked about bringing monolithic applications into the cloud native o11y world. In my sixth article, I provided you with an introduction to a new open source dashboard and visualization project and shared how to install the project on your local developer machine. The seventh article I explored the API and tooling provided by the Perses project. Then I spent time in an article  covering the open dashboard specification that you need to follow and then you started creating your first dashboard. Finally, in the previous article, you expanded your dashboard with a few charts, gauges, and rows.

In this article you'll complete the workshop and add a few advanced components to your dashboard.

Uptime Community - When does Kubernetes make sense?

On Tuesday, February 28th at 19:00 hours CET, 13:00 East Coast, and 10:00 West Coast I'm going to be at the Uptime community event titled, When does K8s make sense? 

As the event page states, it's going to be a lot of fun with four experts debating on the topic of 'When Does Kubernetes Make Sense?'. 

The panel will work its way through three main questions:

1. When does Kubernetes make sense? Which situations have they personally seen?
2. How is this changing? What has to change in tools, management or core K8s?
3. How does it impact engineers? What skills are most helpful - and most overlooked?

Questions from the audience will be embedded into the discussion by the moderator.

O11y Guide - Building Advanced Dashboard

The ongoing series covering my journey into the world of cloud native observability continues in this article, where I'm continuing to explore an open source dashboard and visualization project. If you missed any of the previous articles, head on back to the introduction for a quick update.

After laying out the groundwork for this series in the initial article, I spent some time in the second article sharing who the observability players are. I also discussed the teams that these players are on in this world of cloud native o11y. For the third article I looked at the ongoing discussion around monitoring pillars versus phases. In the fourth article I talked about keeping your options open with open source standards. My last installment, the fifth article in this series, I talked about bringing monolithic applications into the cloud native o11y world. In my sixth article, I provided you with an introduction to a new open source dashboard and visualization project and shared how to install the project on your local developer machine. The seventh article I explored the API and tooling provided by the Perses project. Then I spent time in an article  covering the open dashboard specification that you need to follow to start creating your first dashboard. Finally, in the previous article, you built your very first dashboard.

In this article you'll flush out that first dashboard completing two rows of charts, gauges, and other components visualizing the performance of the target instance.

Cloud Native + k8S Edinburgh Meetup - 3 Pitfalls Everyone Should Avoid with Cloud Data (slides)

 Tonight I was in Edinburgh for the Cloud Native + Kubernetes Edinburgh meetup. With over 650 members, this group was a perfect venue for my talk about cloud native and the struggles we are having with all of the data it generates.

These insights on pitfalls everyone should avoid with cloud data are a constant work in progress as the entire cloud native world is moving so fast. It needs constant tending to further refine some of the improvements that have been worked into the story lately.

We met in the offices of Codebase (just down the hill from Edinburgh Castle) and the Cloud Native + Kubernetes Edinburgh and I wanted to share my slides as I promised.

O11y Guide - Building Your First Dashboard

In this installment of the series covering my journey into the world of cloud native observability, I'm continuing to explore an open source dashboard and visualization project. If you missed any of the previous articles, head on back to the introduction for a quick update.

After laying out the groundwork for this series in the initial article, I spent some time in the second article sharing who the observability players are. I also discussed the teams that these players are on in this world of cloud native o11y. For the third article I looked at the ongoing discussion around monitoring pillars versus phases. In the fourth article I talked about keeping your options open with open source standards. My last installment, the fifth article in this series, I talked about bringing monolithic applications into the cloud native o11y world. In my sixth article, I provided you with an introduction to a new open source dashboard and visualization project and shared how to install the project on your local developer machine. The seventh article I explored the API and tooling provided by the Perses project. Finally, in my previous article I covered the open dashboard specification that you need to follow to start creating your first dashboard.

In this article you'll start developing your very first dashboard!

WTF is SRE 2023 - Telling Effective Tales About Production (accepted)

Good news this week. I'll be speaking at this new (for me) event called WTF is SRE 2023, to be hosted in London from 3-5 May 2023.

This is the fourth edition and they are putting on four tracks; Observability, Reliability, DevEx and DevSecOps. 

You must be asking the same thing I was when I got this invite to submit, what is WTF is SRE? Well they say, "It is a highly-rated, very-tweeted-about, ridiculously-fun, wildly-insightful two-day conference designed to improve the world of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)."

As you can tell from the tone and style, these have got to be some really fun people to hang out with for a few days, so I'm all in with the following submissions.

O11y Guide - Exploring Perses Dashboards

Getting started with Perses

In this eighth installment of the series covering my journey into the world of cloud native observability, I'm continuing to explore an open source project called Perses. If you missed any of the previous articles, head on back to the introduction for a quick update.

After laying out the groundwork for this series in the initial article, I spent some time in the second article sharing who the observability players are. I also discussed the teams that these players are on in this world of cloud native o11y. For the third article I looked at the ongoing discussion around monitoring pillars versus phases. In the fourth article I talked about keeping your options open with open source standards. My last installment, the fifth article in this series, I talked about bringing monolithic applications into the cloud native o11y world. In my sixth article, I provided you with an introduction to a new open source dashboard and visualization project and shared how to install the project on your local developer machine. The previous and seventh article I explored the API and tooling provided by the Perses project. 

In this eighth article I'm diving in to understanding what makes up a Perses dashboard. This is a preview of the fourth lab developed for my hands-on workshop dedicated to exploring dashboards and visualization.

Cloud Native + Kubernetes Edinburgh Meetup - 3 Pitfalls Everyone Should Avoid with Cloud Data

As fate would have it, not only am I going to be in Edinburgh for the first 2023 event for the Edinburgh Tech Meetup, but also in the second week for the Cloud Native + Kubernetes Edinburgh meetup.

With over 650 members, this group is spot on for the topic I'm presenting. These insights on pitfalls everyone should avoid with cloud data are a constant work in progress as the entire cloud native world is moving so fast. It needs constant tending to further refine some of the improvements that have been worked into the story lately.

On 15 February 2023 I'll be at the offices of Codebase (just down the hill from Edinburgh Castle) and the Cloud Native + Kubernetes Edinburgh meetup placed the following event announcement online.

WTF is SRE 2023 - Perses workshop and telling SRE tales

I'm getting ready for a raw and real experience at this new (for me) event called WTF is SRE 2023, to be hosted in London from 3-5 May 2023.

This is the fourth edition and they are putting on four tracks; Observability, Reliability, DevEx and DevSecOps. 

You must be asking the same thing I was when I got this invite to submit, what is WTF is SRE? Well they say, "It is a highly-rated, very-tweeted-about, ridiculously-fun, wildly-insightful two-day conference designed to improve the world of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)."

As you can tell from the tone and style, these have got to be some really fun people to hang out with for a few days, so I'm all in with the following submissions.

Edinburgh Tech Meetup - Getting Started with Perses Workshop

On 7 February 2023 I've been invited to speak at this years inaugural Edinburgh Tech Meetup. 

This is a monthly TechMeetup that they say is an "...excuse for developers and the tech community around Scotland to meet up and learn new stuff from each other. No name badges, no sales pitches, just informative presentations from your peers and a chance to meet some of the tech community around you. We're not centered around specific languages, technologies or disciplines; we believe there's stuff to learn from mixing everyone together."

With that in mind, I was looking to share a brand new workshop I've been rolling out, so this is my opportunity to get some first and feedback from a group of technical enthusiasts. 

Devoxx UK 2023 - Tracing Adventures, Observability Architecture, and Tales

Anyone that follows my events and speaking articles knows that I have always been a big fan of the Devoxx series. Across Europe I've spoken as several of these events over the years and one of my absolute favorites is the Devoxx UK hosted in London.

Last year I was in London in May for the 2022 edition talking about architecture and tooling. This year they are hosting it from 10-11 May 2023 and I am more than excited to bring some of the new topics I'm exploring within the cloud native observability world to share with her attendees.

In the spirit of continued support for Devoxx UK, I'm not only sending in papers for my own talks, but I've enticed a few new and old colleagues to submit papers with me.

The following are my thoughts and ideas that I'm hoping to share with you in London in the Spring.