ObservabilityCon 2024
This year, I got to attend my first tech convention with my engineering manager Inga. The event was held in 22 Bishopsgate London, UK, and was hosted by Grafana. There was many different talks thoughout the day, with a variety of topics.
Overall, the event was a great expierence and was worth the trip.
I’ve listed some of the talks that I attended below:
- Instrumentation and ingestion in an instant: Demo of Grafana Alloy, Grafana Beyla, and OpenTelemetry
- Troubleshoot faster with unified application and infrastructure observability in Grafana Cloud
- A user’s guide to Grafana Cloud’s end-to-end IRM solution
- How Booking.com redefined agnostic observability with Grafana Labs
- AI/ML in Grafana Cloud: Saving toil, time, and money
- Building a Generative AI Assistant for Grafana Cloud: Harnessing the Power of Amazon Bedrock
- How Dexory scaled observability for its fleet of autonomous robots with Grafana Cloud
Meeting with Grafana
Our Grafana rep, Faith, was kind enough to set us up with a meeting with Richard (RichiH) Hartmann who is the Director of Community at Grafana Labs. We had a great chat about adoption of SLOs and how to get started with them.
We also discussed IRM (Incident Response Management) and how it can be used to improve our incident response times. RichiH offered a different perspective on managing IRM in relation to SLOs.
We spoke about a feature request for a GitHub Actions integration, one of the engineers mentioned that GitHub Actions is being used internally, so it sounds like the integration is on the way.
Highlights
- Adaptive Logs: We made good use of Adaptive Metrics earlier this year, and now that it’s been extended to logs, Adaptive logs is at the top of my list.
- Incident Rooms: Both Inga and I were really impressed by this feature. Using AI to track incidents, assist with report writing, and being able to guide the AI bot is a game-changer.
- Contextual Root Cause Analysis (Available Q1): The ability to pull together all telemetry data for quick troubleshooting was highly impressive. The demo left a strong impression.
- Grafana Alloy, OTEL, Beyla: In the coming months, we need to move to Alloy. Beyla seems particularly useful for us, potentially saving us from modifying older applications with OTEL.
- K6 Studio as a Standalone App: I’m keen to explore this further for synthetic monitoring.