Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

One challenge for the widespread adoption of telemetry pipelines for SRE teams within an organization is knowing where to start when building a pipeline. Faced with a wide assortment of sources, processors, and destinations, setting up a telemetry pipeline can seem like trying to build a Lego set without any instructions. The solution is to provide teams with pre-defined components that provide specific functionality, that they can then use to build pipelines that meet their own requirements.

Alerts that you receive from your observability tool are based on conditions that existed seconds to minutes in the past, because the alert is only triggered after the data has been indexed within the tool. This means that your ability to take timely action in response to the condition is significantly limited, and often your window of opportunity to react is past by the time you receive the alert.

It’s 10:00 p.m. on a Sunday when my 9th grader bursts into my room in tears. She says she doesn’t understand anything about algebra and is doomed to fail. I jump into supermom mode only to discover I don’t remember anything about high school math. So, I do what any supermom does in 2024 and head to ChatGPT for help. These generative AI chatbots are amazing. I quickly get a detailed explanation of how to solve all her problems.

Most engineers will tell you this: Troubleshooting today feels like trying to find your way out of a wild jungle, in the middle of a storm, at night, while a countdown clock is running. In other words, it’s ambiguous, nerve-racking, and plain difficult. But should this be the norm?

When DNS Says: Talk to the Hand! What? This started with a post on social media, which created a discussion among us industry professionals. The following conversation happened when I got to talk to my coworkers about some interesting things regarding DNS responses. Putting us gearheads in a room always results in an interesting comment or two!

Remember the Tabs vs. Spaces arguments? It seems that observability has grown up enough that we are arguing over which signals are the “best” signals for observability. Often referred to as the Pillars of Observability, Metrics, Logs, and Traces (sometimes adding Events for MELT) each provide a unique perspective on a system. What happens when we change our perspective from finding the “best” telemetry format to finding the telemetry that aligns with the problems we need to solve?