Observability Sidequests, AI prompt workflows and debugging Kubernetes Clusters

Join us for presentations, snacks, and discussion! This time around we have an agenda of monitoring topics on the complete opposite spectrum. We'll talk about pure hobbyist monitoring topics, AI prompt based workflows and debugging your production Kubernetes clusters when they are on fire.

Special thanks to Nokia and Mark Prosser for hosting us at their downtown office.

Agenda:

6:00-6:15 PM: Arrivals and introductions

6:15-6:35 PM: Observability Sidequests

6:35-6:40 PM: Q&A

6:40-7:10 PM: Uh, is this a good idea? Examining the viability of reusable AI prompt-based workflows for developers

7:10-7:15 PM: Q&A

7:15-7:35 PM: Debugging your Kubernetes Cluster when it's on fire.

7:35-7:40 PM: Q&A

7:40-8:00 PM: Q&A, networking and wrap up

Talk 1: Observability Sidequests! - Eldin from Grafana
Eldin will demo some of his personal use dashboards, like monitoring his 3D printer and household CO2 and temperature sensors.

Eldin helps people make sense of their systems through better observability. He's spent years in support, services, and advisory roles, so he knows what it really takes to make tech work in the real world. These days, he's all about helping teams solve modern observability challenges and systems that actually make life easier.

Talk 2: Uh, is this a good idea? Examining the viability of reusable AI prompt-based workflows for developers - Adriana - Dynatrace
It’s tempting to throw AI onto everything we do these days. But do we have to?

Can we be lazy enough to tell our AI assistant to set up our local developer tooling for us with just some well-constructed prompts, without having to rely on our platform engineering friends?

Can we achieve the Star Trek dream of saying, “Computer, run level 10 diagnostic.” and the computer would just know? And could it be repeatable and shareable?

This talk explores the developer's journey of creating a natural-language, reusable prompt-based workflow with Block's Codename Goose to provision a local development environment.

Attendees will learn about:
* MCP and Goose
* The target demo workflow
* Challenges faced, and key takeaways

Attendees will also come away with an understanding of the possibilities and limits of creating reusable prompt-based workflows, answering the question: can developers self-provision tools using natural language? And just because they CAN, SHOULD THEY?

Adriana Villela is a blogger, host of the Geeking Out podcast, CNCF Ambassador, and maintainer of the OpenTelemetry End User SIG. By day, she focuses on Observability and OpenTelemetry, as a Principal Developer Advocate at Dynatrace. By night, she climbs walls. She also loves capybaras, because they make her happy.

Talk 3: Debugging your Kubernetes Cluster when it's on fire - Nikola Grcevski - Grafana

Imagine you have a Kubernetes cluster that’s hosting some number of services, perhaps these services are written in different programming languages, perhaps there are some databases in the cluster too. Now, imagine that this cluster is intermittently experiencing errors and it’s not easy to tell what’s going on.

In this talk I will show you how you can add detailed telemetry immediately to a problematic production environment cluster, without any changes to your existing cluster configuration or applications, with the new OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation project. We’ll show you how you’ll be able to get insights into what’s wrong with your cluster or services, by leveraging on-demand distributed traces and connectivity graphs, even if it’s the first time you have heard the term OpenTelemetry.

Nikola Grcevski has worked as a software engineer for more than 20 years, mostly in the field of compilers, managed runtimes and performance optimization. Most recently he's working on low level application instrumentation with eBPF at Grafana Labs.