We attended KubeCon 2022 – here are our top 5 takeaways

Chronospherians across the map have returned to their homes after an exciting, engaging and chaotic (in the best way possible) CloudNativeCon + KubeCon North America 2022.

With around 16,000 total attendees — including 7,400 folks attending in-person (more than 2x the size of last year!) — and 300+ sponsors, this year’s KubeCon felt truly re-established and re-energized. There was a packed agenda of daily keynotes and sessions around topics that resonate in today’s cloud native world — think developer productivity, site reliability, platform engineering, engineering burnout, and cloud native observability (everyone wants better insights and outcomes!)

What now? With so much great info, all we can do is reflect on everything we’ve learned and experienced. That’s why we’ve compiled our 5 favorite takeaways from the event.

At Chronosphere, we believe that the best way to bring best practices to the market is not just by hearing it from us, but also first-hand from our customers. It’s not every day that you see a company sharing the stage with their customers, but that’s just what we did this year — multiple times.

We kicked off Prometheus Day with a keynote — Is it time to raise your metrics game? — led by Chronosphere co-founder and CEO, Martin Mao, and Yash Kumaraswamy who is a Senior Staff Engineer and tech lead for observability at Robinhood. The pair talked about how companies like Robinhood are seeing value from their metrics and observability systems become lower over time while their investment is increasing, especially as the data grows. Martin led things off saying, “We are here to talk to you about techniques in reversing that and making your ROI improve.”

Check out the official KubeCon recap video here!

Later that day, our customer DoorDash shared how it handles metrics at scale in the session, Centralized vs. Decentralized Prometheus, Scraping Architecture with DoorDash. DoorDash Software Engineer, Rabun Kosar, and Chronosphere Senior Sales Engineer, Ales Koprivnikar, offered the audience a better understanding of DoorDash’s decision to use a decentralized approach for Prometheus metrics collection in general, but also why they chose to deploy centralized collectors for specific use cases. They also spoke about how Chronosphere’s observability platform enables them to use a hybrid approach.

You can watch the official KubeCon replay of the entire session here!

DoorDash Infrastructure Engineer, Emma Wang, and Chronosphere Solutions Architect, Benjamin Raskin, helped close out KubeCon 2022 with a Friday discussion about the challenges DoorDash was facing with StatsD and why it needed to find another solution. Key challenges with StatsD included limited support for tags, the number of metrics that scale with user traffic, and lack of histograms, to name a few.

Stay tuned for an update with KubeCon’s full recap video of this session!

We also presented solo at other sessions. Check out our live blog posted from the KubeCon show floor to read up on:

• Monday’s Open Observability Day session: Distributed Tracing – The Struggle is Real with Chronosphere Field CTO, Ian Smith.

• Wednesday’s main event session: Multi-Cluster Stateful Set Migration: A Solution To Upgrade Pain with Peter Schuurman from Google and Matt Schallert from Chronosphere.

Stay tuned for an update with KubeCon’s full recap video of this session!

How big of a deal is KubeCon? So big that theCUBE’s presence covers the entire three-day event live. And in what’s becoming an annual tradition, Chronosphere stopped by theCUBE’s studio to discuss all things open source and cloud native observability.

Chronosphere CEO Martin Mao and Head of Product Jeff Cobb sat down with theCUBE’s Savannah Peterson and John Furrier and touched on everything from Chronosphere’s growth over the past year (3x revenue + 100% retention), to our KubeCon product announcement around helping cloud native engineering teams work more efficiently (see below for more details), to how Chronosphere allows companies to handle the data explosion, to how Chronosphere is positioned to help combat the rise of developer burnout. Check out the session!

Later in the week, Field CTO Ian Smith sat down with theCUBE to continue the conversation around observability. There, he discussed topics such as why we should think about the three phases of observability vs the three pillars, developer efficiency, ROI and the problem with data explosion, and how customers like DoorDash demonstrate Chronosphere’s value.

You can watch Ian’s session below!

We love delivering exciting news that delights our customers. And everybody loves new features. That’s why, at this year’s KubeCon, we announced a new version of the Chronosphere platform that has not two or three, but four new features. The common theme for all of them is that Chronosphere is designed for the way cloud native engineering teams need and want to work.

You can watch our Director, Product Marketing, George Hamilton, lay it all out in this LinkedIn video post or read the details below.

With Workspaces and Collections, it’s all about putting data in the right context at the right time and for the right engineering team, so they can find the data that’s relevant to their issue much faster. Read KubeCon 2022: Observability for the way cloud native engineering teams need and want to work to learn more about this feature.

Trace Metrics give teams the ability to compute a metric from trace data. With this tracing news, we are providing another powerful triage tool for cloud native engineering teams. Check out A more integrated user approach to tracing now available to learn more on this new tracing capability.

Our new Query Accelerator capability works behind the scenes to speed up slow performing queries so that engineers spend less time waiting for dashboards to load and more time troubleshooting issues. Read Experience faster dashboards with Query Accelerator to learn more about how this feature can change a team’s everyday experience for the better.

Our Quotas capability allows a central observability team to govern observability data usage by team. With Quotas, you can give every team a budget and then give them the tools to actually make sure that they stay under budget and ensure they don’t use up the entire data allocation for all the different observability teams.

On Prometheus Day, Chronosphere announced our partnership with co-founder and PromLabs founder, Julius Volz, to donate PromLens to the Prometheus organization. You can read the blog by our co-founder and CEO, Martin Mao — Chronosphere and PromLabs donate PromLens to Prometheus organization — to learn more about the donation.

Here comes the fun…

With all of the KubeCon chaos, we thought everyone needed a well-deserved party. And what better way to celebrate than with classic arcade games and bar food?

Nearly 400 pinball wizards and expert racers joined Chronosphere for a Thursday night full of fun and (mostly-friendly) competition in downtown Detroit.

We had a blast catching up with familiar faces and meeting new O11Y legends at “the original Arcade Bar,” Barcade.

Speaking of O11Y Legends… did you get a chance to play Chronosphere’s O11Y legend video game that we built from scratch at our booth? Yep, we actually created our very own Level Up Observability video game for our booth! Our top players from KubeCon received $100 Steam gift cards.

And in terms of prizes, we’re announcing the winners of our Atari 2600 lego set prize and our grand prize – a $3,000 Ultimate Gaming setup, soon! Stay tuned! 👀

Documentary: Prometheus origin story

Our co-founder and CTO, Rob Skillington, appeared several times in a new and unique documentary that premiered at Prometheus Day. In < 30 minutes, Inside Prometheus: An Open Source System That Changed Technology walks you through the origin, mass adoption, and rise of Prometheus. In addition to Rob, you’ll hear from Julius Volz, co-creator of Prometheus, and other pioneers and engineers in the Prometheus community. Check it out here:

What would an amazing show be without a video recapping the highlights? In this quick video you get a fun tour of Chronosphere at KubeCon 2022. In 90 seconds you’ll be whisked through the gamut from our active booth on the show floor to our big Level Up Cloud Native party at Barcade “the Original Arcade Bar” to sessions and keynotes with customers like Robinhood and DoorDash. Check it out here:

To summarize, this year’s CloudNativeCon + KubeCon was legendary – thanks to our customers that hopped on stage with us, our talented Chronosphere team, and the companionship of thousands of industry professionals that flooded in from around the world.

Thank you KubeCon, thank you Detroit, and thank you to everyone who contributed to this year’s event. As always, we’d love to connect and stay in touch!

‘Til next year!