Graphing Success: Neo4j, Making Prometheus OTel-native, Burn Money, Burn!

Dear Java enthusiasts,

We are delighted to announce our next Meetup at the Munich office.

This event is equal to Grafana & Friends Munich, Thu, Jul 27, 2023, 6:30 PM | Meetup

All talks will be presented in English.

Agenda:

• 18:30 Walk in
• 18:40 Food
• 18:55 Talk 1 (see below)
• 19:40 Break
• 19:55 Talk 2 (see below)
• 20:40 Break
• 20:55 Talk 3 (see below)
• 21:40 Drinks

Talk 1:
"Graphing Success: Neo4j for Dynamic People Management in Consulting"
by Ertjon Mecka (Software Engineer, OpenValue)
In the fast-paced world of consulting, effective management of human resources can make or break a project's success. This presentation explores how Neo4j, a leading graph database, can be harnessed as a powerful tool for optimising people management in consulting companies.

We will begin by delving into the world of graph databases and understanding when and why they shine as the perfect solution. With a focus on the consulting industry, we will highlight the unique challenges and opportunities that arise when managing human resources in dynamic project environments.

The heart of our presentation will be the practical demonstration, where we showcase real-world examples of Neo4j in action. Witness the application of powerful Neo4j algorithms, such as similarity, centrality, and community detection, and learn how they can revolutionise people management strategies in consulting firms.

By the end of this presentation, software engineers in the audience will have a clear understanding of the potential of Neo4j as a transformative tool for managing people in the consulting world. Join us as we unlock new possibilities for optimising team dynamics, enhancing project efficiency, and ultimately, driving business success.

About Ertjon
Ertjon Mecka is a Java Software Engineer working for OpenValue Munich. He likes to focus on Java and its ecosystem, having experience in lots of domains. Besides this, he is passionate about Algorithms and Data Structures, especially Graphs. For this reason he started to contribute to Neo4j.

His other interests besides contributing to the Open Source community are playing football and volleyball.

Talk 2:
"Making Prometheus OpenTelemetry-native" by Goutham Veeramachaneni (Product Manager, Grafana Labs)
OpenTelemetry is coming up as the emerging standard for instrumenting and transporting telemetry data. There is good integration between Prometheus and OpenTelemetry, with the conversion between the two as part of the OpenTelemetry specification.

However, the query experience and overall the usability of Prometheus when being used as an OTel metrics backend is quite lacking. The Prometheus community is working towards bridging the gaps and making sure that Prometheus is the best backend for OpenTelemetry metrics.

In this talk, we will present the current state and the solutions being implemented right now to address some of them. We will also present the longer road-map which will address some of the fundamental datamodel issues, putting us on the path to become 100% OTel native without compromising on the Pull model and what made Prometheus great.

About Goutham
Goutham is a Prometheus maintainer with experience maintaining the TSDB. After spending many years helping build and run the hosted Prometheus service at Grafana, he recently transitioned to Product Management, manging the Application Observability and OpenTelemetry products. He still hasn't lost the itch to code, and continues to contribute to Prometheus, OpenTelemetry and other open source Observability tools.

Talk 3:
"Burn Money, Burn! Or what part of your monthly Cloud bill you spend on unused resources?" by Fedor Dikarev (Sr. Software Engineer, Grafana Labs)
With the flexibility that Cloud providers give to their users for creating resources and especially when your project is in growing phase, it’s very easy to loose the track of resources you created once and left unattended. And if you run your project using k8s with it’s dynamically provisioning features, it will become very challenging to keep the track of the resources that are not in use anymore but still contribute to your bills.

Here I will share a story how we faced with that issue in Grafana Labs, I will provide a quick overview of the OSS `unused` tool we built to address that problem with detecting and cleaning unused disks.
And also I will show a set of Grafana Dashboards we built that helped us to find the owners of these unused disks and engage owners to remove these unused disks, cutting our Cloud bills.
At the end I will share our plans to extend that tool and what to expect in the next 2 quarters.

About Fedor
IT-specialist with more than 20 years overall IT experience. Currently Senior Software Engineer in Capacity Squad in Grafana Labs, ex-Google SRE in Capacity Management Team.