Providing Business Value with Observability By Chris Bailey from Terazo

Presentation Abstract

In this talk, we’ll explore what observability is, how to apply it, and how it can be leveraged to provide quantifiable value to the business.

We’ll start with a fictional logistics company whose legacy infrastructure struggles to keep up. We will work through designing a micro-services architecture that seeks to solve their issues, and then instrument that new system using observability techniques. We will discuss the different layers of instrumentation and how each layer drives us closer to being able to deliver business value.

Next, we will talk through in detail the ‘business layer’ - using statsd to collect business-specific metrics that are relevant to the operation and success of the company. We will then build visualizations around this data, giving us a granular view into the operation of the system. We will then discuss how to interpret this data, giving us an understanding of how system performance at all levels impact our fictional customer(s) directly.

Finally, we will discuss a methodology for instrumenting your own environments to make them observable and the benefits that these can provide to your business - from capacity planning, to forecasting, to an observability-driven backlog and more.

Chris' Bio

Chris Bailey believes that everything should be data driven and won’t stop relating his hobbies to observability, whether it’s driving race cars, working on his pilot’s license, or convincing his board gaming group to track plays and scores. He currently works as head of Reliability Engineering at Terazo where he works to create a culture of finding answers to questions that haven’t been asked yet. He also helps organize DevOpsDays Raleigh and the Triangle DevOps Meetup group, with over 3300 members. He lives in Durham, North Carolina with his dog, Ferdinand - who also helped write this bio.

We will NOT be providing any food or beverages for this event.