Observability 2.0 in the Real World: Lessons from SimpliSafe's Engineering Journey
In this candid and insightful talk from Observability Sessions Boston, Laban Eilers, a platform engineer at SimpliSafe, takes us on a practical deep dive into the evolution of observability—from the traditional “three pillars” model to the emerging promise of Observability 2.0.
Learn how SimpliSafe, a company delivering home security as a cloud-based service, balances power and cost across metrics, logs, and traces. Laban explores the trade-offs between high-cardinality "wide events" and lightweight metrics, shares hard-earned lessons on OpenTelemetry, and explains why Observability 2.0 is more of a North Star than a silver bullet.
You’ll come away with a nuanced perspective on:
- The economic and technical trade-offs between metrics and wide events
- Sampling strategies that make distributed tracing practical
- Why logs and metrics still matter in a trace-driven world
- Real-world pitfalls in observability tooling and tracing maturity
- How Grafana Cloud and OpenTelemetry are shaping a more integrated, flexible future
☁️ Grafana Cloud is the easiest way to get started with Grafana dashboards, metrics, logs, and traces. Our forever-free tier includes access to 10k metrics, 50GB logs, 50GB traces and more. Sign up: https://grafana.com/get/
❓ Have a question that isn't related to this video? Check out the Official Grafana Community Forums: https://community.grafana.com/
👍 If you found this video useful, be sure to give it a thumbs up and subscribe to our channel for more helpful Grafana videos.
📱 Follow us for the latest and greatest on all things Grafana and our other OSS projects.
X: (https://www.twitter.com/grafana)
LinkedIn: (https://www.linkedin.com/company/grafana-labs/)
Facebook: (https://www.facebook.com/grafana)
#Grafana #Observability