This year, the focus for me and my teams remained on the four pillars of our role: speaking, publishing, socializing, and hands-on content generation.
While 2024 was about observability (o11y) taking center stage, 2025 was the year we put those theories into practice, accelerated our momentum, and stated to gain serious traction in the wild.
Read on to find out more!
Today as previously mentioned, with my co-presenter Graziano Casto, we've shared our story at SREday London.
This event is two days and focused on Site Reliability, DevOps, and Cloud with three tracks of talks. The venue will be the Everyman Canary Wharf, a rather hip location for this event and should be a lot of fun meeting with attendees and speakers.
This collaboration story is about bringing observability to the foundations of your developer experience, ensuring it's a first class citizen in the platforms you are engineering from day one while discovering that it's giving SREs their super powers.
Below you will find the slides, the abstract, and our thanks for attending this event.
This event is two days and focused on Site Reliability, DevOps, and Cloud with three tracks of talks. The venue will be the Everyman Canary Wharf, a rather hip location for this event and should be a lot of fun meeting with attendees and speakers.
Graziano and I met a few years ago at Platmosphere and we've since been sharing topics of platform engineering and observability. This has led us to several events, including SREDay in Amsterdam last year and now London this year!
Below you will find the abstract for the story we plan to share.
As we ease into the last few days of 2024, I like to close out this one last task and that's reflecting back on all the fun, challenges, and travel over the past year.
While it takes a bit of research to gather all the facts and figures from the last year, it's not a hard one to write. I've been sharing on this site for almost 20 years now and without ads or trying to earn anything from it. It's been truly an open and honest effort to communicate with the world. Funny thing is, when I started out I never imagined that it would take off like it has, eclipsing over 3.8 million views at the time of this writing.
With that in mind, let's dive right into the main focus, where me and my teams are focusing on the four pillars of our role; speaking, publishing, socializing, and hands-on content generation. On top of that, collateral damage is traveling the globe to do it.
Are you ready to start your journey on the road to collecting telemetry data from your applications? Great observability begins with great instrumentation!
In this series you'll explore how to adopt OpenTelemetry (OTel) and how to instrument an application to collect tracing telemetry. You'll learn how to leverage out-of-the-box automatic instrumentation tools and understand when it's necessary to explore more advanced manual instrumentation for your applications. By the end of this series you'll have an understanding of how telemetry travels from your applications, to the OpenTelemetry Collector, and be ready to bring OpenTelemetry to your future projects. Everything discussed here is supported by a hands-on, self-paced workshop authored by Paige Cruz.
The previous article explored the first part of how to link metrics to trace data using exemplars, where we configured our application to expose metrics and a Prometheus instance to collect those metrics. In this article we'll look at the second part focused on implementing the exemplars, tying together metrics with our trace data.
Are you ready to start your journey on the road to collecting telemetry data from your applications? Great observability begins with great instrumentation!
In this series you'll explore how to adopt OpenTelemetry (OTel) and how to instrument an application to collect tracing telemetry. You'll learn how to leverage out-of-the-box automatic instrumentation tools and understand when it's necessary to explore more advanced manual instrumentation for your applications. By the end of this series you'll have an understanding of how telemetry travels from your applications, to the OpenTelemetry Collector, and be ready to bring OpenTelemetry to your future projects. Everything discussed here is supported by a hands-on, self-paced workshop authored by Paige Cruz.
The previous article explored how developers are able to manually instrument their applications to generate specific metadata for our business to derive better insights faster. In this article we'll look at the first part of how to link metrics to trace data using exemplars.
This year's Infobip Shift EU was from 15-17 September and below you will find the outline of my workshop I'm giving covering observability for Platform Engineers.
My talk was based on an observability workshop collection covering metrics, tracing, pipelines, and visualization of telemetry data. Platform engineering can and should include observability from the basic start of their developer experience and these open source CNCF projects all provide what you need to get started.
Below you will find my slides and the original abstract from my workshop.
Are you ready to start your journey on the road to collecting telemetry data from your applications? Great observability begins with great instrumentation!
In this series you'll explore how to adopt OpenTelemetry (OTel) and how to instrument an application to collect tracing telemetry. You'll learn how to leverage out-of-the-box automatic instrumentation tools and understand when it's necessary to explore more advanced manual instrumentation for your applications. By the end of this series you'll have an understanding of how telemetry travels from your applications, to the OpenTelemetry Collector, and be ready to bring OpenTelemetry to your future projects. Everything discussed here is supported by a hands-on, self-paced workshop authored by Paige Cruz.
The previous article zoomed into the usage of Jaeger to help developers when visually exploring their telemetry data. In this article we'll help developers with manually instrumenting to add metadata specific to their application or business allowing them to derive better insights faster.
I spoke on the main stage which was hosted in the Croatian National Opera House, something that remains a special experience. I've stayed in contact with the organizers and went to Infobip Shift EU in Zadar last September presenting on avoiding the common pitfalls around the flood of cloud data that typically comes with the user experience. In the Spring I was at Infobip Shift NA in Miami to share a workshop focused on the Perses project.
This year's Infobip Shift EU is from 15-17 September and below you will find the outline of my workshop I'm giving covering observability for Platform Engineers.
Let's look at the session and activities around this year's event.
Are you ready to start your journey on the road to collecting telemetry data from your applications? Great observability begins with great instrumentation!
In this series you'll explore how to adopt OpenTelemetry (OTel) and how to instrument an application to collect tracing telemetry. You'll learn how to leverage out-of-the-box automatic instrumentation tools and understand when it's necessary to explore more advanced manual instrumentation for your applications. By the end of this series you'll have an understanding of how telemetry travels from your applications, to the OpenTelemetry Collector, and be ready to bring OpenTelemetry to your future projects. Everything discussed here is supported by a hands-on, self-paced workshop authored by Paige Cruz.
The previous article programmatically instrumented and configured an application to direct all telemetry data to a Jaeger instance for visual insights. In this article we'll zoom into the usage of Jaeger to help developers when visually exploring their telemetry data.
Are you ready to start your journey on the road to collecting telemetry data from your applications? Great observability begins with great instrumentation!
In this series you'll explore how to adopt OpenTelemetry (OTel) and how to instrument an application to collect tracing telemetry. You'll learn how to leverage out-of-the-box automatic instrumentation tools and understand when it's necessary to explore more advanced manual instrumentation for your applications. By the end of this series you'll have an understanding of how telemetry travels from your applications, to the OpenTelemetry Collector, and be ready to bring OpenTelemetry to your future projects. Everything discussed here is supported by a hands-on, self-paced workshop authored by Paige Cruz.
The previous article we explored how to leverage programmatic instrumentation in our application as developers would in their daily coding using OTel libraries. In this article we carry onwards to improve the visualization of our telemetry data that was being displayed in console output. We are going to programmatically instrument and configure our application to direct all telemetry data to a Jaeger instance for visual insights.
Are you ready to start your journey on the road to collecting telemetry data from your applications? Great observability begins with great instrumentation!
In this series you'll explore how to adopt OpenTelemetry (OTel) and how to instrument an application to collect tracing telemetry. You'll learn how to leverage out-of-the-box automatic instrumentation tools and understand when it's necessary to explore more advanced manual instrumentation for your applications. By the end of this series you'll have an understanding of how telemetry travels from your applications, to the OpenTelemetry Collector, and be ready to bring OpenTelemetry to your future projects. Everything discussed here is supported by a hands-on, self-paced workshop authored by Paige Cruz.
The previous article we explored how to gain better insights by adding manual instrumentation to our application leveraging the existing auto-instrumentation. In this article, we move on to programmatic instrumentation in our application as developers would in their daily coding. We'll be using OTel libraries and eventually visualize the collected telemetry data in Jaeger.
Are you ready to start your journey on the road to collecting telemetry data from your applications? Great observability begins with great instrumentation!
In this series you'll explore how to adopt OpenTelemetry (OTel) and how to instrument an application to collect tracing telemetry. You'll learn how to leverage out-of-the-box automatic instrumentation tools and understand when it's necessary to explore more advanced manual instrumentation for your applications. By the end of this series you'll have an understanding of how telemetry travels from your applications, to the OpenTelemetry Collector, and be ready to bring OpenTelemetry to your future projects. Everything discussed here is supported by a hands-on, self-paced workshop authored by Paige Cruz.
The previous article we took our first steps in generating telemetry data using automatic instrumentation. In this article, we explore how to gain better insights by adding manual instrumentation to our application leveraging the existing auto-instrumentation.
Are you ready to start your journey on the road to collecting telemetry data from your applications? Great observability begins with great instrumentation!
In this series you'll explore how to adopt OpenTelemetry (OTel) and how to instrument an application to collect tracing telemetry. You'll learn how to leverage out-of-the-box automatic instrumentation tools and understand when it's necessary to explore more advanced manual instrumentation for your applications. By the end of this series you'll have an understanding of how telemetry travels from your applications, to the OpenTelemetry Collector, and be ready to bring OpenTelemetry to your future projects. Everything discussed here is supported by a hands-on, self-paced workshop authored by Paige Cruz.
The previous article introduced observability concepts and terms as related to OpenTelemetry and its components. In this article, we continue onwards with our first steps in generating telemetry data using automatic instrumentation.
This meetup is a generalist event for everyone in the Glasgow tech community. It welcomes people with all levels of experience, even if you are starting your journey into tech as a student, boot camper, or you're thinking of starting your development career, you are more than welcome.
I'm going to be sharing an introduction to both cloud native observability and touch on tracing with OpenTelemetry on 4 July 2024. I'm the second talk of the evening but it all kicks off at 18:00.
Below you'll find the slides I used and the links to the workshop referenced at the end to provide attendees with a hands-on workshop to build out the demo discussed at the event.
In this series you'll explore how to adopt OpenTelemetry (OTel) and how to instrument an application to collect tracing telemetry. You'll learn how to leverage out-of-the-box automatic instrumentation tools and understand when it's necessary to explore more advanced manual instrumentation to your applications. By the end of this series you'll have an understanding of how telemetry travels from your applications, to the OpenTelemetry Collector, and be ready to bring OpenTelemetry to your future projects. Everything discussed here is supported by a hands-on, self-paced workshop authored by Paige Cruze.
This first article takes time to lay the foundation, defining common observability and monitoring terms that help us gain an understanding of the role of OpenTelemetry and its components. There is more reading available for you on learning about the basics of OpenTelemetry.
I was asked to share some insights into the link between Platform Engineers and the importance of providing cloud native observability tools and infrastructure as part of their developer experience from the start.
We had a movie theater as a venue with a nice group of experienced Platform Engineers that I presented the slides you'll find below before letting them choose from four different workshops that featured the CNCF observability technologies for monitoring, tracing, telemetry pipelines, and open visualization.
We kicked it off at 11:00 on Tuesday, March 19th and had a lot of fun. See below for the details.
This is also always one of the easiest articles to write, going back now since this blog started, meaning I've been doing them over 18 years now. Who would have imagined back in 2005 when I started publishing articles for this blog that I'd be at it 18 years later and have garnered almost 2.6 million views?
It takes a bit of research every year to get this article done, as I've been traveling, speaking, publishing, socializing, and generating so much content throughout the year. It's always fun to see all the code, writing, and travel adventures passing the review as I sit here in contemplation of what is coming for the new year.
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.
The title of episode 171 is, Your First Steps in Cloud Native Observability and we covered a bunch of questions around the series of articles I've been writing called the O11y Guide. It's taking you along for the journey in my learnings as I go from an application development background into the world of cloud native o11y.
Below is a list of the topics we covered in the 20+ minutes of the podcast, which you can find on all major platforms to listen / subscribe to.