Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In this episode of Pastries and SREs, we dig into how vendor lock-in and sky-high observability costs are forcing teams to choose between coverage and budget, AND why you shouldn’t have to settle. With donuts in hand, we explore how to take back control of your observability strategy by making it cost-effective, comprehensive, and flexible.

Observability doesn’t have to be a mystery. Join SolarWinds Tech Evangelist Chrystal Taylor and THWACK MVP Jez Marsh, Owner of Silver Back Systems, as they crack the code on turning noisy data into actionable insights. Part of the THWACKcamp lineup from SolarWinds Day, in this session you’ll learn how to analyze raw logs and metrics to uncover trends, catch issues early, and make smarter, faster decisions. Discover practical techniques for linking cloud and on-premises data, reducing false alerts, and automating repetitive tasks with tools like Custom Properties.

When your logs don’t follow a standard format, it can be difficult to extract valuable information, like key-value pairs and nested JSON objects. Grok parsing lets you define flexible patterns that match unstructured log data so you can extract specific fields to query, filter, and visualize. In this video, you’ll learn how to: By refining your Grok parsers, you can make your logs more useful for analytics, dashboards, or alerts, and get even more value from your logs.

Stop letting typos or OTel SDK updates break your production dashboards! This KubeCon 2025 talk introduced Otel Weaver, a new tool that lets you live-check your OpenTelemetry data before you merge. It's unit testing for your telemetry.