DevOpsDays PDX: Choose Your Own CNCF Observability Project Adventure (workshops)

I'm headed to the Pacific Northwest for the DevOpsDays PDX conference from 8-10 September.

I really like the vibe of this conference with the local scene full of really engaged developers and observability enthusiasts. I submitted a few ideas around my own personal open source interests and they came back asking me to facilitate a hands-on workshop. 

The workshop is the sum of all my personal explorations of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) projects over the last four years. For this event they will be expanded into the option of running and exploring all the projects on a lightweight Kubernetes for your personal machine (k3s).

Read on for more details

A New Chapter: Joining SUSE as Technical Advocacy Lead

There are moments in your career where the path forward becomes surprisingly clear. After years of building, shipping, and advocating in the open source and cloud native ecosystem, I find myself at one of those moments. 

Today I'm excited to share that I've joined SUSE as Technical Advocacy Lead — and I couldn't be more energized about what lies ahead.

Let me back up a bit, because getting here is a story worth telling.

KubeCon EU 2026 - From Hallucinations to Hardware: Diagnosing LLM Failures

I'm excited to share that a talk I submitted, with my good friend Ryan Peirce, was accepted to Cloud Native AI & Kubeflow Day! 

In case you were still unaware, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon is the flagship conference of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), gathering adopters and technologists from leading open source and cloud native communities. The event brings together the entire cloud native ecosystem for education, collaboration, and networking opportunities.

Every year this event features multiple co-located events, and we're excited to be presenting at Cloud Native AI & Kubeflow Day, which focuses on the intersection of cloud native technologies and artificial intelligence workloads.

Below are all the details of our session at the time of this writing.

2025 Year in Review: Community, Contribution, and Changes

As we ease into the last few days of 2025, I like to close out this one last task: 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, it’s a rewarding effort. I’ve been sharing on this site for two decades now—no ads, no ulterior motives—just an honest effort to communicate with the world.

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!

Cloud Native London Meetup: Mastering Fluent Bit - Ultimate Guide to Integrating Telemetry Pipelines with OpenTelemetry (slides + recording)

As previously posted, I spoke today at the Cloud Native London meetup on the topic of mastering Fluent Bit. 

I really like the organization and the consistently high volume of smart attendees to test out my ideas. Again they proved why it's so fun to share my integration story with them about Fluent Bit and OpenTelemetry.

 Below you will find my slides from this evening, a link to the live stream that captured all my live demoing of Fluent Bit, OpenTelemetry, and Prometheus all working seamlessly together!

Tech Meetup Glasgow - Mastering Fluent Bit: Ultimate Guide to Integrating Telemetry Pipelines with OpenTelemetry (slides)

Today I was with my friends at the Tech Meetup in Glasgow, where I mentioned previously I'd be bringing a hands-on session on mastering Fluent Bit.

Last time over a year ago I was here to share insights into OpenTelemetry, but this time I wanted to bring a new project to the stage: Fluent Bit.

This meetup started in the Edinburgh area, but expanded into 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 spent the evening sharing an introduction to Fluent Bit pipelines and OpenTelemetry Collector and most of the session on live demoing the complete integration story to showcase it from front to back.

My slides from the talk are available online below.

Cloud Native Los Angeles: Observability-as-a-Service (slides)

As mentioned previously, Graziano Casto and I presented an online session for the Cloud Native Los Angeles meetup. We shared our thoughts on the subject of Observability-as-a-Service as related to when Platform Engineering and SRE teams work together. 

The CNCF's Los Angeles (LA) community group represents the LA cloud native community and aims to promote and champion CNCF and open source technology as well as help network and collaborate. To that end, we are contributing whole heartedly!

By combining our personal experiences and expertise in Platform Engineering and Cloud Native Observability, we think this session provides good insights into how one can leverage the two disciplines to better our developer team's experiences.

We had a small live audience, but the talk was recorded, so I'm sharing our slide deck, the talk abstract, and the recording when it's available.

Cloud Native London Meetup: Mastering Fluent Bit - Ultimate Guide to Integrating Telemetry Pipelines with OpenTelemetry

Back on 7 Aug 2024 I was to speak at the Cloud Native London meetup, having been given the opportunity to present due to a speaker canceling at the last minute. I really like the organization and the consistently high volume of smart attendees to test out my ideas, so I was really excited to share an integration story with them about Fluent Bit and OpenTelemetry.

Instead, there was an evacuation of the area due to expected riots in the UK and the event was cancelled.

Fast-forward, it's now finally going to happen on 7 May 2025 with a more polished version than I would have brought back in the late summer of 2024. 

Tech Meetup Glasgow - Mastering Fluent Bit: Ultimate Guide to Integrating Telemetry Pipelines with OpenTelemetry

The last time I was in Glasgow was for the Tech Meetup in July 2024. I spent the evening sharing the basics of OpenTelemetry and provided hands-on workshop content for all attendees to try out at home.

On 1 May 2025 I'm headed back to the Tech Meetup Glasgow, but this time I'm going to take them on a live demo ride with Fluent Bit and OpenTelemetry!

The meetup started in the Edinburgh area, but has also expanded into 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 Fluent Bit pipelines and OpenTelemetry Collector, then live demo the complete integration story to showcase it from front to back.

Cloud Native Los Angeles: Observability-as-a-Service

On Friday, 11 April 2025 both Graziano Casto and I will be presenting an online session for the Cloud Native Los Angeles meetup, sharing our thoughts on the subject of Observability-as-a-Service. 

The CNCF's Los Angeles (LA) community group represents the LA cloud native community and aims to promote and champion CNCF and open source technology as well as help network and collaborate. To that end, we are contributing whole heartedly!

By combining our personal experiences and expertise in Platform Engineering and Cloud Native Observability, we think this session provides good insights into how one can leverage the two disciplines to better our developer team's experiences.

Join us on this journey.

Cloud Native Rejekts London: Mastering Fluent Bit - Ultimate Guide to Integrating Telemetry Pipelines with OpenTelemetry (slides + video)

Today, as previously mentioned, I presented a fun hands-on session at Cloud Native Rejekts in London. 

This event was started by a Netherlands based organization, hence the unique Dutch spelling of the word rejekts, and is meant to be a second chance for talks not accepted into the main CNCF event.In the past I've spoken at the North American event sharing a session on Perses, and at the European event sharing OpenTelemetry insights. 

Today I shared a live demo session focused on integrating Fluent Bit with OpenTelemetry. Below you will find the session recording (video), slides and abstract.

SREDay London 2025: When Platform Engineers meet SREs (slides)

 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. 

SREDay London 2025: When Platform Engineers meet SREs

I'm going to be at SREday London from 27-28 Mar 2025 with my co-presenter Graziano Casto, developer relations engineer at Mia-Platform sharing a platform engineering meets SRE story.

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.

Cloud Native Rejekts London: Mastering Fluent Bit - Ultimate Guide to Integrating Telemetry Pipelines with OpenTelemetry

One of the really fun events around the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) flagship event KubeCon + CloudNativeCon is Cloud Native Rejekts. This event started by a Netherlands based organization, hence the unique Dutch spelling of the word rejects, and is meant to be a second chance for talks not accepted into the main CNCF event.

I love the idea of second chances and believe many of the talks given at Cloud Native Rejekts should have been in the main event. Quality and quantity of these talks is often astounding. Since my transfer from the application development domains to the cloud native observability domain more than two years ago, I've never missed a single CFP for this event. 

In the past I've spoken at the North American event sharing a session on Perses, and at the European event sharing OpenTelemetry insights. This year I've been selected to the Cloud Native Rejekts EU event with a session sharing what integrating Fluent Bit with OpenTelemetry looks like, including live demo components.

O11y Guide: Finding observability and DevEx tranquility with Platform Engineering

Monitoring system behavior is essential for ensuring long-term effectiveness. However, managing an end-to-end observability stack can feel like sailing stormy seas—without a clear plan, you risk blowing off course into system complexities. 

By integrating observability as a first-class citizen within your platform engineering practices, you can simplify this challenge and stay on track in the ever-evolving cloud-native landscape.  

Entering the world of monitoring distributed systems is a journey made up of several stages which we will cover in the rest of this article. 

2024 Year in Review - Observability Takes Center Stage

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.

Rundeck by PagerDuty Meetup: MTTS - Sleep more, slog less (slides)

Previously, I posted about joining the Rundeck by PagerDuty Meetup and fellow open source automation enthusiasts at a happy-hour informal gathering during KubeCon in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Tonight I was live at their meetup sharing my session on now to sleep more, slog less, and get your Mean-Time-To-Sleep (MTTS) scores as low as possible!

I always want to reach out and thank all who attended to chat with PagerDuty's automation specialists and me from Chronosphere. It is always a fun time to share more about how to gain control over your telemetry data and observability challenges.

The final task is to always provide the slides I used on stage, so that anyone can pursue them at their own pace later. You'll find them below. 

Rundeck by PagerDuty Meetup: MTTS - Sleep more, slog less

I'm going to be joining the Rundeck by PagerDuty Meetup and fellow open source automation enthusiasts at a happy-hour informal gathering during KubeCon in Salt Lake City, Utah.

They are providing small bites, drinks, and get some cool PagerDuty swag, so come hang out and meet more automation enthusiasts experts. 

There will be a hands-on demo session, a session with new automation tricks to bring back to your team, and my session on Mean-Time-To-Sleep (MTTS).

Join us for a couple of hours of power and chat with PagerDuty's automation specialists and me from Chronosphere to learn more about how to gain control over your telemetry data and observability challenges.

A Hands-on Guide to OpenTelemetry - Linking Metrics to Traces with Exemplars (part 2)

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.

KCD Porto: Choose Your Own Adventure - Cloud Native Observability Pitfalls (slides)

Today I presented at  KCD Porto in Portugal, speaking to one of my favorite subjects in observability.  .

This inaugural event was really well done and had four different stages with talks from key-note speakers, leading experts and technical experts, and interactive workshops. 

There were a lot of different opportunities for networking across the two day event in sunny Porto, where the food, snacks and drinks throughout the event were nothing short of amazing! There were over +300 attendees at the Alfandega Congress Center which is right on the Douro river, so the views from my session were stunning out over the river. 

Below you will find the slides from my session and the abstract.