Have you considered applying observability but struggled to match the strategy with the tooling? Or maybe you were lost on how to do it?

I had a great discussion with Hazel Weakly about Observability beyond Open Telemetry, keeping it "meaty" with practical thoughts. I learned a lot, and I'm sure you will, too! Just check the recording!

Hazel is one of the best people in the observability space. I’ve been following her work for a long time. Don’t believe me? Check her works, e.g.:

• Redefining Observability,

• The 4 Evolutions of Your Observability Journey

• OpenTelemetry Challenges: Handling Long-Running Spans

• OpenTelemetry: Bridging Platform and Enablement

• Monitoring Mastodons - A Story about Hachyderm

Of course, Hazel is more than that and spends her days working on building out teams of humans as well as the infrastructure, systems, automation, and tooling to make life better for others. She’s worked at a variety of companies, across a wide range of tech, and knows that the hardest problems to solve are the social ones. Hazel currently serves as a Director on the board of the Haskell Foundation and is fondly known as the Infrastructure Witch of Hachyderm (a popular Mastodon instance). She also created the official Haskell “setup” Github Action and helps maintain it. She enjoys traveling to speak at conferences and sharing what she’s learned with others.

I first saw her when I joined the Hachyderm Mastodon instance. She was the person trying to handle the sudden massive traffic spike of people transitioning from Twitter. Trying to keep Postgres and Ruby-based systems alive in the on-premise basement installation.

Sounds familiar? Yet, it’s a similar story to our cases when we underprovision our systems, trying to recover unexpected traffic quickly. It’s hard without the system being observable. It was a nice starting point for our discussion, but we covered much more. We went through, e.g.

• What’s even observability?

• How do we define observability strategy?

• How do we apply it in practice?

• Hazel hints at how to set up observability in existing and new systems.

• How to be reasonable and build observability from different tools, metrics, traces, and logs.

• How to make organisation change and facilitate tech vs product discussions.

• Event-Driven vs Observability.

• And much more!

It’s a bold statement, but I believe you’ll have difficulty finding more actionable guidance on this topic than Hazel gives in this recording.

Warning: we went beyond Open Telemetry; if you never had contact with it, it’d be great if you checked other resources, e.g. Hazel articles or previous editions:

• When Logs and metrics are not enough: Discovering Modern Observability

• Making your system observability predictable

• Gojko Adzic on designing product development experiments with Lizard Optimization

• Why to measure and make our system observable? How to reason on chaotic world

Nevertheless, I believe that the talk was accessible and also filled with a great piece of advice for all.

That’s why we do not have a paywall here; we’d like you to benefit from it!

Please leave the comments and share them with friends. We’d like to hear your thoughts!

Cheers!

Oskar

p.s. Ukraine is still under brutal Russian invasion. A lot of Ukrainian people are hurt, without shelter and need help. You can help in various ways, for instance, directly helping refugees, spreading awareness, and putting pressure on your local government or companies. You can also support Ukraine by donating e.g. to Red Cross, Ukraine humanitarian organisation or donate Ambulances for Ukraine.

Webinars:

• #1 - From CRUD to Event Sourcing

• #2 - Keep your streams short! Or how to model Event-Sourced systems efficiently

• #3 - Implementing Distributed Processes

• #4 - From CRUD to CQRS in practice

• #5 - Architecture Weekly 100 Edition - Live Q&A

• #6 - Alexey Zimarev - You don't need an Event Sourcing framework. Or do you?

• #7 - Design and test Event-Driven projections and read models

• #8 - Slim down your aggregates!

• #9 - Radek Maziarka - Modularization with Event Storming Process Level

• #10 - PostgreSQL Superpowers in Practice

• #11 - Maciej "MJ" Jędrzejewski - Evolutionary Architecture: The What. The Why. The How.

• #12 - Jeremy D. Miller: Simplify your architecture with Wolverine

• #13 - Yves Goeleven - The Fantastic 9

• #14 - Mateusz Jendza: Why Verified Credentials is the Future of Digital Identity!

• #15 - Mário Bittencourt: Leveraging BPMN for Seamless Team Collaboration in Software Development

• #16 - Papers We Love #1 - Sagas (Hector Garcia-Molina, Kenneth Salem)

• #17 - Simple patterns for events schema versioning

• #18 - Andrea Magnorsky: Introducing Bytesize Architecture Sessions!

• #19 - Laïla Bougriâ: Debug your thinking

• #20 - Papers We Love #2 - How do committees invent? (Melvin E. Conway)

• #21 - Michael Drogalis: Building the product on your own terms

• #22 - On Performance Testing with Jarosław Pałka

• #23 - Gojko Adzic on designing product development experiments with Lizard Optimization

• #24 - Frontent Architecture, Backend Architecture or just Architecture? With Tomasz Ducin

• #25 - Applying Observability: From Strategy to Practice with Hazel Weakly