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.

First off, the lightning talks are going to be held on Wednesday, 11 Oct from 17:30-18:30 local Dublin time. They will be in a really fun format of just 4 minutes where you get 16 slides that auto advance every 15s. That should keep me on my toes!

As for my lightning talk, I'm going to start by declaring metrics, logs, and traces are dead! This will lead into the core message of the three phases of observability (o11y).

Three phases to better observability outcomes

We all want to have better business outcomes for our organizations solutions, such as faster remediation of problems, easier problem detection, greater revenue generation, happier customers, and engineering teams that can remain focused on delivering more business value. The problem with the popular three pillars (metrics, logs, tracing) is that you are talking about technology aspects and not about solutions. It's like talking about the tools in a mechanics toolbox used to make your convertible run again, instead of focusing on the blue smoke coming out of the exhaust, the rising engine temperature, and using that data to quickly remediate the problem by replacing the seals to prevent oil leaking in the engine. Let’s quickly tour the phases that lead to better outcomes and get our focus back on effective observability goals.

Get ready to think outside the box as, metrics, logs, and traces are dead! Long live the Phases of O11y!

If you are interested in the long story version of this talk idea, see my article covering this topic in the O11y Guide series