Tessa Bradbury
I am a Staff Software Engineer and SRE with 10 years working in the industry. I have a particular interest in the socio-technical system of software development and how we can use our tools to help us rather than as challenges that must be overcome.
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Session
When you're running a web service used by customers or running a daily data pipeline, you need a way to know if it's working. One option is to wait until users start flooding your support system or someone idly comments that the data seems old and you realise your data pipeline hasn't worked for a week. Another option is to have your code tell some central system whether things are working or not and then make pretty graphs out of it, and potentially wake someone up if things are bad enough. Having the machines automatically tell you if things are wrong rather than waiting for the humans is generally preferable.
This talk will be a beginner to intermediate introduction to observability and to OpenTelemetry, a vendor-agnostic collection of APIs, SDKs, and tools for observability. I will answer questions like:
- What do you mean by telemetry? What are metrics, logs and traces and when would I use each?
- What's OpenTelemetry? What does it give you out of the box? How do all the pieces fit together?
- Okay, I want to spin this thing up, what do I need to know?
I will also cover some of the business goals that can be achieved by using OpenTelemetry, eg standardised tagging, scrubbing PII and cost attribution.