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!
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.
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.
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.
The event is three days of fun and sharing technology learnings from all corners of the industry. As the event site says, the Netherlands is home to a large, vibrant technology community. Amsterdam, in particular, has been a flurry of activity in the past several years, drawing attention from around the globe.
Devopsdays Amsterdam brings all disciplines, such as development, operations, QA, InfoSec, management, and leadership, together to discuss culture, tools and skills to make better organizations and products. The expectation is around 600 attendees this year and will be held from June 19-21, 2024 at the Pakhuis de Zwijger in the center of Amsterdam.
The first day is all about workshops, focusing on hands-on activities, from coding to cooperation in several parallel tracks in smaller settings. The format of the following 2 days includes a single track of 30-minute talks in the morning, followed by Ignite talks (5-minute, auto forwarding slides).
Below is my workshop abstract and details.
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.
There are so many things going on there, from the pre-event Cloud Native Rejects from 17-18 March at ESpot in Paris. You will find an array of talks that, in theory, didn't make the selection for KubeCon and yet are so good we have two days of enjoying them.
This is followed by a day of co-located events, which are single day conferences targeting specific areas of technology and CNCF communities. This all happens on 19 March and see the website listing for exact locations of the event that interests you.
Finally, we get to spend 20-22 March in the Paris Expo Porte De Versailles with thousands of our favorite community members sharing information, workshops, talks, lightning talks, and a huge booth pavilion.
Below you'll find all the fun and adventures that I have planned throughout the week in Paris.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 .
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.
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.
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.
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.
It was on-site at the Huntington Place Convention Center in room 360, which is on the river with views across the water into Canada. Just a bit of geography as many attendees I spoke with were not aware that Detroit was so close to the northern US border.
The full schedule for Open 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 Prometheus and observability. Let's look closer at my impressions of the sessions I found interesting.