Good observability is essential for modern software. It gives us confidence that our systems are working properly. And it also allows us to debug issues efficiently. In this talk, I did during the Open Fest 2021 conference, I shared everything you need to know to start applying good observability to your projects. And showed the most common pitfalls you need to be aware of.
I started with the basic concept of monitoring. And I went over the 3 most common mistakes people make with it. Then I showed how to have automatic alerts to detect issues. And I touched on the principles for setting up good alerts.
As a final step, I went over how to build your logging system and how to apply it in the most efficient way to debug issues easily.
Here are the slides.
And here is the recording.
Here is the list of some resources I found interesting while preparing the talk.
- Fast and flexible observability with canonical log lines (very interesting but couldn't find a place for it in the talk)
- My philosophy on Alerting
- Monitoring server applications with Vortex (from Dropbox)
- Lessons from Building Observability Tools at Netflix (not the typical ELK-style solution where you store logs in storage and query it later on)
- Why Percentiles Don’t Work the Way You Think (all articles by this author on this website are amazing)
- Monitoring in the time of Cloud Native (long and very informative article if you are new to observability)
- What Is Cardinality in Monitoring?
- How to Monitor the SRE Golden Signals
And lastly, here is what the stage looked like from the speaker's standpoint. It was my first offline conference since the pandemic began. And it was at an outdoor venue at a park. So the vibe was amazing.
