Speaker: Austin Parker

Modern systems architecture often splits functionality into microservices for adaptability and velocity. The challenge of managing infrastructure for microservices has led to the cloud native ecosystem, including Kubernetes, Envoy, gRPC, and other projects. Observability, including application performance management (APM), is an essential component of a cloud-native stack. Without observability, application developers and operators cannot understand the behavior of their applications and ensure the reliability of those applications.  

OpenTelemetry (the successor to OpenCensus and OpenTracing) is a standardized library and specification that collects distributed traces and metrics from instrumented services. By instrumenting once with OpenTelemetry, developers and operators can understand how data and events flow through their applications through a variety of different visualization backends.  

In this workshop, you’ll learn how to instrument a distributed set of microservices for traceability using OpenTelemetry, and how to analyze your service’s traces using open source software backends like Jaeger/Zipkin. Finally, you’ll be able to leverage OpenTelemetry vendor-neutral flexibility to try out other tracing backends including the hosted SaaS products Stackdriver and Honeycomb, without recompiling. And you can go home feeling comfortable with implementing OpenTelemetry in your own applications, and being prepared to choose how you will store and visualize traces.

Modern systems have resulted in an explosion of complexity for organizations of every size, shape, and purpose. In an effort to create more resilient and reliable software, we’ve cast around for solutions to tame and manage this complexity. Observability practices have come to be seen as essential for operating systems at scale, but in practice they’re often seen as technical solutions to what is ultimately a social problem: Software, at the end of the day, is built and run by people.

Human-Centric Observability is a methodology to evaluate observability practices by how they impact, and are built around, three distinct groups of people: external users, internal users, and engineers. In this talk, you’ll learn how to identify these groups and the value of putting them at the center of your observability practice. You’ll take away valuable insights from years of building and running deep systems at scale, and how we’ve built not only resilient software, but a resilient organization -- one that can adapt to changing requirements and needs. At the end of this talk, you’ll have a framework to not only evaluate your own internal practices, but also be inspired to do more to make on-call suck less for your team.

Modern systems architecture often splits functionality into microservices for adaptability and velocity. The challenge of managing infrastructure for microservices has led to the cloud native ecosystem, including Kubernetes, Envoy, gRPC, and other projects. Observability, including application performance management (APM), is an essential component of a cloud-native stack. Without observability, application developers and operators cannot understand the behavior of their applications and ensure the reliability of those applications.  

OpenTelemetry (the successor to OpenCensus and OpenTracing) is a standardized library and specification that collects distributed traces and metrics from instrumented services. By instrumenting once with OpenTelemetry, developers and operators can understand how data and events flow through their applications through a variety of different visualization backends.  

In this workshop, you’ll learn how to instrument a distributed set of microservices for traceability using OpenTelemetry, and how to analyze your service’s traces using open source software backends like Jaeger/Zipkin. Finally, you’ll be able to leverage OpenTelemetry vendor-neutral flexibility to try out other tracing backends including the hosted SaaS products Stackdriver and Honeycomb, without recompiling. And you can go home feeling comfortable with implementing OpenTelemetry in your own applications, and being prepared to choose how you will store and visualize traces.