Chronosphere’s top highlights from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2023

Chronosphere showed up in force to demonstrate to attendees how they can use cloud native observability and our platform to “See It. Find It. Fix It. Faster,” with “it” being any event or issue within complex cloud native environments. For those that couldn’t attend – or didn’t get a chance to visit us – here’s a look at what went down in Chicago last week.

We officially announced Chronosphere Lens – a feature designed to empower developers in the cloud native era. Integrated into the Control Plane, Chronosphere Lens provides a dynamic, service-centric view of telemetry data that’s easily accessible and all in one spot. It also helps distill raw telemetry data into insights, reducing the cognitive load for developers and helping them do what they do best: creating innovative software.

We also launched support for event metrics and Change Event Tracking. Being able to ingest and track events helps developers get real-time insight into any alterations or changes within their cloud native environments. Now, they can tag, monitor, and analyze changes as they occur – instead of needing to piece together what happened when any sort of change happens within a service or code.

In addition to our big product announcement, Chronauts were busy presenting and chatting about open source standards, observability, and cloud native.

Paige Cruz, Senior Developer Advocate, led a workshop on the basics of OpenTelemetry instrumentation. In 90 minutes, she covered how attendees could use a Python application, tracing spans, and metrics to set up a foundation for out-of-the-box auto instrumentation – and when to manually instrument metadata.

Paige also presented a Lighting Talk at the Google Booth on the cost of collecting cloud native metrics – and how to figure out what metrics are actually worth storing.

Eric D. Schabell, Director of Evangelism, explained how to become a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) ambassador, what’s involved in the role, and steps to become an ambassador. Attendees learned about writing, speaking, publishing, and advocacy involved in the ambassador role – and specific requirements from the CNCF. With his experience as a current ambassador, he also provided concrete examples of publishing, his advocacy, and his workshops.

Of course, getting the word out about Chronosphere and observability didn’t stop there. Our executives spent time talking to theCUBE and The New Stack about the latest from Chronosphere and providing industry insights.

Co-Founder and CEO Martin Mao sat with theCUBE for a fourth time and chatted about the Chronosphere Lens launch, its main goal, and how it can reduce SEV1 and SEV0 events by 75 percent. He also delved into the cost implications and issues around cloud native data and how Chronosphere is taking steps to control data growth, reduce overall costs, and identify useful data. The hosts also chatted with him on how Chronosphere (and the observability space) has grown since KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2022.

theCUBE also talked with Field CTO Ian Smith about what conversational themes he saw at the show, such as OpenTelemetry, open source, and cloud native adoption. He explained that in previous years more customers were interested in open source technology, but this year saw an increased urgency around actual technology adoption and more trust with Kubernetes and microservice architectures. He also delved into how just selecting the right tool shouldn’t be your whole observability strategy; it’s now much more involved and requires more planning to get the right fit.

Over on the Stack Overflow Podcast, CTO Rob Skillington chatted with hosts about the evolution of M3, the technology of cloud native observability, engineering productivity, and the “buy vs. build” debate.

The fun stuff: Swag and parties

Chronauts kept busy at our booth educating attendees about cloud native observability, open source, and the Chronosphere platform. Through lots of demos and conversations, it’s clear to see that there’s interest in using observability to reduce overall data costs, efficiently run cloud native environments, and make work easier for developers through platform engineering tools.

In between conversations, we stamped passports, gave out socks, drank beers from Moody Tongue while conversing with Martin at the KubeCrawl: A “party” on the solutions showcase was full of attendees playing games, eating food from around the world, and catching up with colleagues new and old to finish out the first day of KubeCon. On top of it all, the attendees got to snuggle and play with puppies to help recharge during the conference.

There was lots of buzz at the Solutions Showcase was around our Daft Punk style  replica helmet as the grand booth prize; so those that entered the drawing should check their emails over the next few days!

Last — but not least — we had a great time connecting with attendees outside of the expo hall at our Cheers to Observability event. We spent the evening with attendees, partners, and customers at the Moody Tongue, which earned Two Stars from the Michelin Guide. Our guests enjoyed tasting one-of-a-kind, chef-inspired beer and getting special insights about the business and brews from CEO Jeremy Cohn.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2023 is always an exciting, packed, and educational event. It’s safe to say we had an incredible time this year and can’t wait to see everyone in Paris at KubeCon EU from March 19-22 next year!