What Your Dashboards and Your Brain Won't Tell You

Join us for a meetup together with Site Reliability Engineering NL, where we explore how to actually see what's happening in your systems and how your own brain might be sabotaging your reliability efforts along the way.

Agenda:
17:45 Doors open, Walk-in and socialising
18:40 Opening
18:45 Guide to Observability with OpenTelemetry - Evelien Schellekens (Elastic)
19:15 It's Not the Tools — It's Us: How Human Biases Undermine Reliability - Marcel Koert (MeloMar IT)
19:45 Food & Drinks
21:00 End

Talks:
​Guide to Observability with OpenTelemetry
​In this talk, we'll show how OpenTelemetry helps you understand what's going on in your apps. We'll explain how it works, using the OpenTelemetry Demo Application running on Azure, and walk through a live demo using Elastic. Whether you're new to observability or just want a clearer picture, this session will give you simple tools and steps to get started. Evelien is a Principal Solutions Architect at Elastic.

Speaker: Evelien Schellekens (Elastic)

It's Not the Tools - It's Us: How Human Biases Undermine Reliability
​In the world of DevOps and SRE, we pride ourselves on automation, observability, and engineering excellence. But even the most sophisticated infrastructure can be derailed by something far more human: our own brains. This talk explores the invisible enemies of reliability — cognitive biases that affect how engineers make decisions, solve problems, and respond to incidents. From confirmation bias during outages to groupthink in postmortems, we'll unpack six specific mental shortcuts that silently undermine your systems. Each bias is brought to life with real-world engineering examples, memorable visuals, and practical strategies you can apply immediately. You'll hear relatable war stories — like how anchoring on a bad hypothesis prolonged a major incident, or how optimism bias led to a Friday deployment that ended in disaster. More than a lecture, this is a wake-up call. We don't need more YAML linters or dashboards. We need to debug ourselves. By the end of the session, you will:

• ​Understand how specific biases impact reliability and team performance
• ​Recognize symptoms of biased thinking in real-world DevOps workflows
• ​Learn actionable techniques to create more resilient, self-aware engineering cultures

Speaker: Marcel Koert (MeloMar IT)