Imagine a well-designed plumbing system with pipes carrying water from a well, a reservoir, and an underground storage tank to various rooms in your house. It will have valves, pumps, and filters to ensure the water is of good quality and is supplied with adequate pressure. It will also have pressure gauges installed at some key points to monitor whether the system is functioning efficiently. From time to time, you will check pressure, water purity, and if there are any issues across the system.

I recently attended SRECon in San Francisco on March 18 - 20, a show dedicated to a gathering of engineers who care deeply about site reliability, systems engineering, and working with complex distributed systems at scale. While there were a lot of talks, I’ll focus on a few areas that gave me the most insight into how having the right data impacts an SREs and an organization’s success.

In our recent webinar hosted by Bill Balnave, VP of Technical Services, and Brandon Shelton, our Solution Architect, we discussed how data's continuous growth and dynamic nature cause DevOps and security teams to lose confidence in their data. The uncertainty about the content of telemetry data, concerns about its completeness, and worries about sending sensitive PII information in data streams reduce trust in the collected and distributed data.

Telemetry data is growing exponentially, but the business value isn’t increasing at a similar pace. Getting the right telemetry data is hard, so I recently had a conversation with Matt Aslett, Director of Research at Ventana Research, now a part of ISG, about five myths and realities in telemetry data handling.

For operational telemetry data pipelines, Vector emerges as a pivotal tool, acclaimed for its robust performance and adaptability.

One of the inherent challenges you'll face when working with Kubernetes is that a typical cluster includes many resources that produce telemetry data. Because producing and moving telemetry data consumes resources, you can end up in situations where different workloads are competing for the resources necessary to manage telemetry data.

Tucker Callaway (CEO, Mezmo) and Kevin Petrie (Vice President of Research, Eckerson Group) had a conversation centered around enterprises taking control of their data and the growing need for consolidated collection and management of telemetry data. They discuss how enterprises can optimize telemetry pipelines, take charge of their data, and enhance their observability and security game.

Last week, I attended the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference (IOCS). Gartner IOCS is my favorite conference every year because of the quality and level of the presentations. Gartner analysts deliver most sessions and put a lot of effort into the presentations and supporting research. ‍ I’d like to highlight two sessions that I found to be very informative.