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.

Dutch Cloud Native Day 2024: Meet the New Kid in the Sandbox, Perses (slides)

As previously mentioned, today I was on-site at the Dutch Cloud Native Day in Amsterdam to speak about one of my favorite Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Sandbox projects, Perses. 

The session I gave covered its attempts at becoming an open specification for dashboards and the open dashboard tool for Prometheus and other data sources. 

We saw how to integrate your visualizations as code, how easy it is to create beautiful dashboards, and I sent the attendees home with a free, online, self-paces workshop to get you started with your first Perses dashboards.

To complete the content sharing, below you will find the slides from my session.

Dutch Cloud Native Day 2024: Meet the New Kid in the Sandbox, Perses

On Tuesday, 10 December I'll be attending and speaking at the Dutch Cloud Native Day in Amsterdam. 

This one day event will be hosted at the University of Amsterdam buildings in the Science Park at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica. 

I'll be sharing an overview of the latest new kid in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Sandbox projects, Perses. The talk will cover its attempts at becoming an open specification for dashboards and the open dashboard tool for Prometheus and other data sources. 

Join me for a fun session on how to integrate your visualizations as code, how easy it is to create beautiful dashboards, and head home with a free, online, self-paces workshop to get you started with your first Perses dashboards.

DevOpsCon Munich - Taking Back Control of Your Telemetry Data (slides)

 As previously mentioned, I was in Munich, Germany today for the DevOpsCon Munich event. 

It's a conference focusing on CI/CD, the Kubernetes Ecosystem, Agile, and Lean Business. It's both in-person and online for those wishing to take the virtual experience.

I was telling a story about how to take back control of your telemetry data. This will be some fun with telemetry pipelines and include several live demos.

Now let's look at the story I'm going to be sharing with the attendees and the slides I used.

SREday Amsterdam 2024 - Finding observability and DevEx tranquility sailing the monitoring data seas (slides)

 As I previously posted, I was in Amsterdam at SREday Amsterdam today with my co-presenter Graziano Casto, developer relations engineer at Mia-Platform sharing a platform engineering story.

This event was one day and focused on Site Reliability, DevOps, and Cloud with a single track of talks. The venue was pretty amazing, the Pongbar, a rather lounge type atmosphere for this event and was a lot of fun meeting all the attendees and speakers.

Below you will find the slides and abstract for the story we presented.

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. 

Cloud Native Rejekts NA: Meet the New Kid in the Sandbox - Integrating Visualization with Prometheus (slides)

I previously posted that I'd be in Salt Lake City at the fun Cloud Native Rejekts this week.

Today I shared my session on Perses, which is focused on providing true open source visualization and dashboards to the users of Prometheus. This talk brought the background, updated the current status of what you can do and what you can't, shared the future plans, and left behind a free hands-on workshop for attendees to pursue post-event.

Projects in the observability space tend to gravitate to the CNCF, and Perses jumped into the process of becoming a CNCF Sandbox project. The process took awhile and in mid-August they kicked off voting. Amazingly it only took a few days for the Perses project to pass the number of voted needed to become the newest member in the CNCF Sandbox tier. It was high time you met this new kid on the block!

Below you'll find the abstract, slides and recording for my session for you to pursue at your leisure.