“Isn’t observability just a fancy term for monitoring?” That’d be the response from most IT folks a few years back if you asked them about it. And here we are in 2023, where Observability now is as imperative a term as security itself.

Software systems are increasingly complex. Applications can no longer simply be understood by examining their source code or relying on traditional monitoring methods. The interplay of distributed architectures, microservices, cloud-native environments, and massive data flows requires an increasingly critical approach: observability.

ObservabilityCON 2023 took place in London this week, showcasing all the latest and greatest trends in open source observability. Following the opening keynote, the event featured a range of breakout sessions — led by both Grafana Labs experts and members of the Grafana OSS community — that explored observability best practices and lessons learned.

Organizations are constantly looking to grow and expand, which requires establishing strong foundations, especially for the IT infrastructure. The challenge in achieving this is to consistently push the limits of the IT infrastructure to deliver more business excellence. To ensure success, management operations should be fine-tuned, and this often requires improving tool sets, skillsets, and personnel.

In today's digital age, the complexity and scope of dynamic system architectures are expanding at an unprecedented rate. As a result, IT teams find themselves grappling with the challenge of monitoring and addressing conditions across multi-cloud environments. With the increasing complexities, IT operations, DevOps, and SRE teams are searching for enhanced observability within these multifaceted computing environments.

As someone living the Honeycomb ops life for a while, SLOs have been the bread and butter of our most critical and useful alerting. However, they had severe, long-standing limitations. In this post, I will describe these limitations, and how our brand new feature, budget rate alerts, addresses them. We usually don’t have SREs writing product announcements, but I’m so excited about this one that I said, “Screw it, I’m doing it!”