An eye on observability for June 2022

Phew! A group of Chronospherians attended Monitorama back in person in Portland and we had a whistlestop (partial) week meeting customers and observability enthusiasts. I had a talk which sparked a lot of interesting discussion, we hosted a very successful whisk(e)y tasting, and all in all, had a great time.

Here are some of my favorite talks and you can find livestreams here:

• Day 1
• Day 2
• Day 3

Day one kicked off in fine form with the infamous Corey Quinn looking at whether you should buy or build observability solutions. Spoiler, “it depends”, as it so often does, but it’s all about the journey, right? Right??

Jonathan Perry dug into one of the hottest topics, eBPF, specifically covering how to use it for monitoring network infrastructure issues and dependency tracking, which is an especially interesting application of the technology.

There were a handful of talks on the schedule not looking directly at observability, but other topics important to the way we work. One was Leon Adato’s covering technical empathy. It covered a lot of valuable topics, but crucially encouraged us to use this empathy to build products our users actually want, not what we think they want.

Finally on day one was the infamous Adrian Cockroft, who precluded my talk to look at how we could actually monitor carbon impact, adding to a recurring theme of using observability for good at the event.

Another key figure already responsible for several key open source observability components, Suman Karumuri, covered a new project from Slack, KalDB, which offers a new storage engine for observability data.

For more from us, and more from me (as I host the conversations), Chronosphere launched a new video series! The series speaks with observability luminaries to get their take on key topics. Find more details in our announcement post.

I couldn’t finish without a few random links from the month too.

First, the OpenTelemetry blog covered how to instrument the Apache web server. While it seems old technology now, it’s easy to forget that it still powers a LOT of the internet, so keeping it lean and running smoothly is massively important.

Over on Hacker noon, Alvarez Parmar looked at when and how to create custom metrics for applications, a great insight when you’re looking to move on from collecting the default metrics an application provides.