Picture This Sandy’s company has a high-profile flagship application. The development team has deployed a microservice to Prod. A few hours after the deployment, the company’s Twitter feed is flooded with angry Tweets from users. The anger spreads to the company’s Facebook page too. The app is acting really weird. It’s not…

I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to wrap my head around Observability, consuming every book, article, and podcast that I could get my hands on. My most recent explorations have gotten me digging into OpenTelemetry. OpenTelemetry (or OTel for short) is an open-source framework for instrumenting code, and many…

As the manager of the Observability team at my current company, I find myself in a rather unique position. As part of my job, I get to define the “golden path” of Observability here. This means building an Observability practice, promoting the use of OpenTelemetry (OTel) and Observability-Driven Development…

If you’re new to the Unpacking Observability series, welcome! If you’ve been following along from the start, thanks for tagging along for the ride! Observability Recap: Observability lets us understand a system from the outside, by letting us ask questions, without knowing the inner workings of that system. Observability allows…

Why should Kubernetes get all the love? There are tons of examples out there on how to deploy the OpenTelemetry (OTel) Collector to Kubernetes. When it comes to deploying the OTel Collector on Nomad, however, you don’t see a lot of stuff out there. Sure, you might see some sample Nomad jobspecs to get you started, but…

If you’ve been following my Unpacking Observability series, you have heard me harp on the fact that Observability (o11y), like DevOps and SRE, is a paradigm shift. And the more APM-minded your organization is, the more challenging it will be to steer them towards Observability Nirvana, which can be super…

If you’ve been following along in my Unpacking Observability series, you know that I’m a big fan of OpenTelemetry (OTel). Instrumenting your code is just part of the picture. The other part? Actually doing something with the telemetry data. That’s where Observability (o11y) back-ends come in. There are a number…

The other day, I found myself bantering back-and-forth with a reader in one of my Medium articles. It ultimately ended with me saying that we were each looking at this problem differently, and we’ll have to just agree to disagree. I’ll admit that I was a bit frustrated by his…

When we think about Observability, we usually think about it in terms of SREs or developers. After all, it’s a mighty powerful practice for helping troubleshoot applications in production. But what if I told you that Observability can fit into the world of QA? What would you say to that? …

You might be thinking that this might be yet another overloaded term to add to your Buzzword Bingo lineup. Maybe you’re rolling your eyes at me over Yet Another X-as-Code thing. Or maybe you want to hurl your shoe at your screen in frustration. But aren’t you the teeeeniest bit…

So you’re new to Observability and OpenTelemetry and Lighststep and you want to send traces to Lighstep to get a feel for the flow of things. But you’re not sure how to get started. There’s a LOT to learn and take in, and things can get pretty overwhelming, pretty fast…

There’s something askew… On the morning of Friday, July 8th, 2022, as I rolled out of bed, I instinctively reached over to my phone to check the weather for the day. Right away, I knew that something was off. My weather app wouldn’t load the weather. I toggled my wifi only to realize…

In the last couple of weeks, I spent a ton of time looking at different ways to send OpenTelemetry (OTel) data to Lightstep. In case the super-obvious title didn’t tip you off already, there are three different ways to do so: Direct from application OpenTelemetry Collector Launchers (via Collector or…

In my last OpenTelemetry blog post, I talked about how to send OpenTelemetry (OTel) data to Lightstep using Golang. That’s all well and good if you’re a Golang developer, but what if you use Python? Well, my friend, you’re in luck, because today, I’ll be looking at how to send…

In my last blog post, I showed y’all how to instrument Python code with OpenTelemetry (OTel), à la auto-instrumentation. You may also recall from that post that I recommended using the Python auto-instrumentation binary even for non-auto-instrumented libraries, because it abstracts all that pesky OTel config stuff so nicely. When…

Have you ever been at a place that claimed to be all in on Observability, only for you to realize that well, they’re not really following Observability practices? Yeah. Me neither. Just kidding. I’ve been in this space long enough to witness my fair share of anti-patterns, or what I…

If you’re new to OpenTelemetry and want to see it in action in a real-life example, the OpenTelemetry Demo app is a great way to get started quickly. In one of my previous blog posts, I showed you how to get the demo app up and running and sending Traces…

with Ana Margarita Medina If you follow Adriana’s writings on Observability Adriana’s writings on Observability , you may recall a post from back in June introducing the concept of Observability-Landscape-as-Code (OLaC) Observability-Landscape-as-Code (OLaC) . An Observability Landscape is made up of the following pieces: Application instrumentation Collecting and storing application…

The concept of Trace-based testing (TBT) was first presented by my awesome colleague, Ted Young, at KubeCon North America 2018. …

This post was originally published on the Syntasso blog. SRE teams are probably equally annoyed by requests from development teams. They don’t want to spend their time fulfilling service requests to install things like PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, and Nginx on Kubernetes clusters for developers. This is honestly a waste of an…