Observability Engineering and understanding Observability Data

Join us for presentations, snacks, and discussion! Thanks to Loblaws' Luca, Amal, Sony and Rui as well as Grafana's own Navish Bahl for presenting.

Agenda:

6:00- 6:10 PM: Arrivals and introductions

6:10- 6:50 PM: Talk 1

6:50- 6:55 PM: Q&A

6:55- 7:20 PM: Talk 2

7:20- 7:25 PM: Q&A

7:25-7:30 PM: Networking and wrap up

Talk 1: Observability Engineering using Grafana - Luca Landi, Amal Soman, Sonny Tu, Rui Duan (Loblaws)

Engineering using Grafana Alertify and Vision are Loblaws' in-house solution to observability. They play a key role in standardizing the observability engineering and monitoring practices. They facilitate the SLO driven SRE practices in the company. They help us save money compared to purchasing other observability suites. Vision uses Grafana to visualize the SLO metrics which are created in our in-house built highly efficient and scalable data pipeline. Alertify uses Grafana grafonnet-lib and a Go program to automate the discovery of the cloud resources and Vision data, and to automate the creation of dashboards and alerts for all sorts of resources. In the presentation, we are going to introduce how we build the Vision data pipeline to automatically generate the metrics in different infrastructure layers such as Akamai, Apigee, Global Load Balancer, and Istio, how we implement the resource discovery in Alertify, how we use versatile Grafana to visualize different time series data (e.g. Google StackDriver metrics) and BigQuery database data, how we use grafonnet-lib to automate the creation of dashboards and alerts, and how we facilitate the standard SLO driven SRE practices.

Luca Landi is a Team Lead focused on key strategies for DevOps, SRE and Observability principles adoption at Loblaw. Luca bootstrapped/implemented key observability platform components plus a reliable/scalable time-series solutions for the Loblaw enterprise and moved to a leadership role to have a wider impact.

Amal Soman is keen to do things related to Systems, Software, and Science. He is a Techie by profession working on SRE stuff. He is now adventuring the observability chances in Loblaws. He got chance to work with multiple tire companies over the past 6 years. everything k8s, keen about observability, cloud native.

Sonny Tu is a Senior Site Reliability Engineer at Loblaws, Sonny brings 6 years of expertise to the forefront of the tech arena. Fluent in working with cloud infrastructure, he excels in orchestrating seamless scaling maneuvers and crafting robust monitoring and alerting systems. Sonny thrives in the dynamic intersection of technology and reliability, ensuring that the digital infrastructure operates at peak performance.

Rui Duan is a senior SRE. He is focusing on the observability engineering in Loblaw. He is keen on technologies used for instrumentation, telemetry, data storage, visualization, tracing, and performance profiling. His research interest also covers build system and CI/CD, programming languages, and virtualization. He loves the open source culture and Grafana, and he is a member of Free Software Foundation.

Talk 2: How [Asserts.ai](http://asserts.ai/) will make it even easier for Grafana Cloud users to understand their observability data, Navish Bahl (Grafana)

[Asserts.ai](http://asserts.ai/) provides an easier way of exploring your telemetry and derive new insights for more efficient root cause analysis and faster issue resolution. This new acquisition by Grafana aligns hand in hand with our mission to help our users and customers understand the behavior of their applications and services.

Navish Bahl is a Solutions Engineer with a decade of experience in observability which was termed monitoring before they decided to switch names. It all started with attaining Cisco networking certifications, understanding the bits & bytes of wired and wireless computer networks. And then transitioned into helping organizations gain visibility into what matters most in today’s world, top notch application performance, which ultimately results in excellent user experience, which further results in meeting or exceeding critical business objectives.