PromCon, the flagship yearly event of the Prometheus community, took place in Berlin 28-29 September 2023, and we’re here to bring you the highlights from the Prometheus ecosystem, including the pivotal decision on Prometheus 3.0! Brace yourselves for some exciting announcements! We also delved into the latest addition to the ecosystem, Perses project, which promises to revolutionize the world of dashboard visualization and monitoring. This new open source project, now part of the Linux Foundati...
Oct 31, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Season 4Ep. 5
DevOps is not just about operating the software in production, but also about releasing that software to production. Well-functioning CI/CD pipelines are critical for the business, and this calls for quality observability, to handle broken and flaky pipeline runs effectively. On this episode I hosted Oleg Nenashev, a core maintainer and board member in the Jenkins project, as well as a TOC member in the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF). Oleg is a community builder, open source advocate and c...
Oct 31, 2023•1 hr•Season 4Ep. 2
Terraform is no longer open source. This is the news we got last month (August 2023), when HashiCorp announced its decision to relicense its open source tools, including Terraform, Vault, Packer, Consul, Vagrant and others, into Business Source License 1.1. The community, led by active Terraform-based vendors, gathered up to create a fork of Terraform to keep it open. The result is OpenTofu (originally called OpenTF), whose manifesto already has tens of thousands of stars on GitHub, less than a ...
Sep 21, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Season 4Ep. 4
Fluentd and Fluent Bit are two highly popular open source projects for data collection and log forwarding in the realm of observability. Fluentd's flexibility and scalability have led to seamless integration with diverse applications and data sources, while Fluent Bit's lightweight and efficient log forwarding have made it a preferred choice for modern observability pipelines. But Fluent Bit can process more than just logs. The recent release of Fluent Bit v2 added major new integrations with Op...
Aug 31, 2023•59 min•Season 4Ep. 3
eBay is a high scale end user of open source observability. Collecting telemetry from millions of endpoints, and running thousands of queries per second, presents serious scaling challenges. eBay has chosen to use an open source stack to meet those challenges. On this episode I hosted Vijay Samuel, Observability Architect at eBay, to hear about the challenges eBay faced in monitoring large Kubernetes installations. We discussed why eBay chose the open source stack, and the strategic decision beh...
Jun 29, 2023•1 hr•Season 4Ep. 1
With over 1,000 companies using it and 21.5K+ stars on GitHub, the Backstage open source project is quickly becoming a go-to tool for managing developer infrastructure. In this episode, I’ll sit down with Lee Mills, a Senior Engineering Manager from Spotify's Backstage project, to learn more about how the open source platform is revolutionizing the developer experience and how it aligns with the growing Internal Developer Platform (IDP) space. We’ll discuss the need that drove Spotify to build t...
May 31, 2023•47 min•Season 3Ep. 12
This is a special episode, live from the KubeCon show floor in Amsterdam. Join us to hear the hot updates from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023 as well as insider insights from the CNCF’s head of ecosystem, Taylor Dolezal. Taylor works on infrastructure tools that enable innovation. He specializes in Kubernetes, Terraform, public clouds, and distributed systems. Taylor will also deliver the opening keynote on the upcoming KubeCon EU in Amsterdam. The episode was live-streamed on 20 April 202...
Apr 27, 2023•28 min•Season 3Ep. 11
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is the home of the most prominent open source projects used today, such as Kubernetes, Prometheus, ArgoCD, Linkerd and more. These projects fuel today’s cloud native architectures and software release pipelines. With its immense growth, it has become difficult to keep tabs on the hundreds of new and evolving projects and specifications, the different working groups and technical advisory groups, the different community forums and events, and to see wh...
Mar 30, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Season 3Ep. 10
Many organizations struggle in understanding and monitoring the costs of their Kubernetes workloads, cloud infrastructure and cloud native applications. Moreover, different cloud providers use different conventions, which makes it difficult to compare across vendors and to monitor cost in multi-cloud environments. The lack of cost observability and vendor-agnostic FinOps standardization can become a critical business challenge. OpenCost is a vendor-neutral open source project for measuring and a...
Feb 23, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Season 3Ep. 9
A 3-node Kubernetes cluster with Prometheus will ship around 40k active series by default! Do we really need all that data? The current state of Kubernetes open source monitoring is in need of improvement. High churn rate of pod metrics, proliferation of metrics with low usage, and configuration complexity are some of the issues that need to be addressed. I discussed this topic with Aliaksandr Valialkin, CTO at VictoriaMetrics and creator of the open source project. We discussed the common probl...
Jan 26, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Season 3Ep. 8
So much has been going on with the Prometheus project and its ecosystem, that it’s time to have a proper catch up. And there’s no better person to walk us through it than Julien Pivotto, who debriefed the community last month at PromCon. Julien Pivotto is a maintainer of Prometheus, the open source monitoring and alerting solution. He is the co-founder of the company O11y, that provides premium support for open source observability tools such as Prometheus, Thanos and Grafana. The episode was li...
Dec 26, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Season 3Ep. 7
At Meta (Facebook, Instragram et al) everything is data, and data driven approach is the rule, from product to engineering, from HR to finance. This is also how the team at Meta treats observability. Let’s see how we treat observability as a data analytics problem, and what you can implement, even if you’re not a hyperscaler. On this episode I’ll host David Ostrovsky from Meta. David is a software developer with over 20 years of industry experience, speaker, trainer, blogger and co-author of “Pr...
Nov 23, 2022•1 hr•Season 3Ep. 6
Everyone’s talking about Platform Engineering these days. Even Gartner featured it in its Hype Cycle for Software Engineering 2022. But what is Platform Engineering really about? Is it the next stage in the evolution of DevOps? Is it just a fancy rebrand for DevOps or SRE? And how does observability pertain to platform engineering? On this episode of OpenObservability Talks Horovits hosted George Hantzaras, Director of Cloud Platform Engineering at Citrix. George is a distributed systems expert ...
Oct 27, 2022•58 min•Season 3Ep. 5
Instrumentation is that black magic that makes our application emit traces, logs, metrics or other telemetry. How does it work? What options are available in different programming languages, such as Java, Python and Go? What does OpenTelemetry offer in this domain? On this episode of OpenObservability Talks I hosted Eden Federman, Co-Founder & CTO at keyval, a company focused on making observability simpler. Eden is the creator of two open source projects: Odigos and Go automatic instrumenta...
Sep 29, 2022•1 hr•Season 3Ep. 4
In this episode, hosted by Jonah Kowall we are excited to introduce Pranay Prateek the co-founder and creator of SigNoz to the audience. He is an entrepreneur who has been building an interesting and exciting open-source observability platform. The goal is a unified interface and data storage system which is scalable and manageable much more easily than today’s disjointed open-source tools. SigNoz has a goal of unifying tracing, metrics, and logging in a single platform and interface. We’ll dig ...
Aug 25, 2022•56 min•Season 3Ep. 3
We all collect logs, metrics and perhaps traces and other data types, in support of our observability. But this can get expensive pretty quickly, especially in microservices based systems, in what is commonly known as “the cardinality problem”. On this episode of OpenObservability Talks I’ll host Ben Sigelman, co-founder and the GM of Lightstep, to discuss this data problem and how to overcome it. Ben architected Google’s own planet-scale metrics and distributed tracing systems (still in product...
Jul 28, 2022•1 hr•Season 3Ep. 2
OpenTelemetry is one of the most fascinating and ambitious open source projects of this era. It’s currently the second most active project in the CNCF (the Cloud Native Computing Foundation), with only Kubernetes being more active. The entire industry is aligning behind this project, including incumbent monitoring vendors that were deeply vested in proprietary and closed-source agents to that end. In this episode of OpenObservability Talks I’ll host Alolita Sharma to discuss OpenTelemetry, its o...
Jun 28, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Season 3Ep. 1
Developers hate monitoring, but we need it. We need it in many points of the software development lifecycle: before deprecating an API, before launching a new feature, after launching the feature, and more. In fact, monitoring needs can vary much more than the classic Ops monitoring. In this episode I’ll host Liran Haimovitch to discuss how to determine what developers should be monitoring, the difference between observability for Dev and for Ops, and how observability fits into our current dev ...
May 26, 2022•59 min•Season 2Ep. 12
OpenSearch is a community-driven, open-source search and analytics suite derived from Apache 2.0 licensed Elasticsearch 7.10.2 & Kibana 7.10.2. The OpenSearch project started just over a year ago and is now the open-source alternative to ELK, which is no longer open source. The team has spent much of the last year getting the project going, but there was innovation as well. We will cover and discuss what OpenSearch has accomplished, but more importantly what’s coming next, including a big 2....
Apr 28, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Season 2Ep. 11
Google’s SRE Book popularized the concept of Service Level Objective (SLO) and the SLO-driven approach. But what does it really mean to make SLO driven decisions? How can we generate observability and synchronize teams around joint SLOs? And how can we automate SLOs and integrate them into the software release pipeline? In this episode I’ll host Andreas Grabner. We’ll discuss the SRE practices, and how to automate SLO from dev all the way to prod. We’ll talk about the open source efforts to stan...
Mar 30, 2022•1 hr•Season 2Ep. 10
What does it take to build observability in a web-scale company such as Slack, Pinterest and Twitter? On this episode of OpenObsevability Talks I'll host Suman Karumuri to hear how he built these systems from the ground up on these #BigTech co's, about his recent research papers and more. Suman Karumuri is a Sr. Staff Software Engineer and the tech lead for Observability at Slack. Suman Karumuri is an expert in distributed tracing and was a tech lead of Zipkin and a co-author of OpenTracing stan...
Feb 27, 2022•59 min•Season 2Ep. 9
SaaS (software as a service) is a popular model for many businesses today. SaaS businesses need agility to move fast and remain competitive. This means agility in the software IT stack, but also agility in the business models and product-led growth (PLG). Observability plays a key role in enabling SaaS organizations to move fast. Achieving this agility, however, raises specific observability requirements. On this episode of OpenObservability Talks we’ll host Aviad Mizrachi, the CTO and Co-Founde...
Jan 31, 2022•58 min•Season 2Ep. 8
We’ve grown to rely on “the three pillars” for observability - logs, metrics and traces. Popular frameworks such as Prometheus have helped popularize these practices. But now people are starting to realize that it’s not enough. On this episode Dotan Horovits will host Frederic Branczyk for a discussion about the unspoken pitfalls of Prometheus and the challenges of current observability coverage. We will also discuss the rise of Continuous Profiling as a new observability signal, what it’s about...
Dec 21, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Season 2Ep. 7
OpenObservability Talks S2E06: Hosting Steve McCanne We hear a lot about BPF in the industry today, applying this flexible technology to solve so many problems from routing, proxying, and of course observability. Correlating events and data from the operating system level across distributed systems is a key problem for the industry and community to solve. I am thrilled to announce Steve McCanne joining us for this episode. I have been lucky enough to spend time with Steve in my career and am del...
Nov 23, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Season 2Ep. 6
Have you ever wondered how services are operated at Google’s scale? Here’s your opportunity to find out. Ramón will share how his SRE team runs Google’s identity services, and the elaborate end-to-end observability they use to achieve it with strict SLA. We’ll also get a glimpse at the birthplace of Kubernetes, OpenCensus, Dapper, Monarch and other cornerstones of today’s cloud-native DevOps and observability. Ramón Medrano Llamas (@ rmedranollamas ) is a staff site reliability engineer at Googl...
Oct 27, 2021•1 hr•Season 2Ep. 5
Observability is becoming a common practice for DevOps teams monitoring and troubleshooting IT systems. But Observability can offer much more than that. More advanced usage of telemetry, and in particular distributed tracing and its context propagation mechanism, can uncover insights into your business performance and can help solve business and FinOps problems. On this episode of OpenObservability Talks I hosted Yuri Shkuro, creator of Jaeger project and a champion of Distributed Tracing, to di...
Sep 19, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Season 2Ep. 4
In this episode, we’ll talk with industry veteran and product manager Anurag Gupta who has been working in open source observability for over 4 years. We will go into depth on his background, and how he views the ecosystem of open source. Then we will dig into the Fluentd and Fluent Bit projects and discuss some of the amazing innovations coming from this project. Learn what’s next for logging, and how a consolidated data collection plane is being driven by the Fluentd project.
Aug 26, 2021•46 min•Season 2Ep. 3
The CNCF has a rich suite to address monitoring Kubernetes and cloud-native workloads. First of which is Prometheus, which is widely adopted, with great out-of-the-box compatibility with Kubernetes. But under the CNCF you can also find OpenMetrics that offers standardization of the metrics format, Thanos and Cortex which offer long-term storage for Prometheus, and other complimentary solutions and integrations. On this episode of OpenObservability Talks we’ll host “RichiH” Hartmann and discuss t...
Jul 25, 2021•1 hr 10 min•Season 2Ep. 2
Current observability practice is largely based on manual instrumentation, which creates a barrier to entry for many wishing to implement observability in their environment. This is especially true in Kubernetes environments and microservices architecture. eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter) is an exciting new technology for Linux kernel level instrumentation, which bears the promise of no-code instrumentation and easier observability into Kubernetes environments (alongside other benefits for...
Jun 30, 2021•57 min•Season 2Ep. 1
OpenSearch project was born out of the passion for Elasticsearch and Kibana and the desire to keep them open source in the face of Elastic’s decision to close-source them. After a couple of months of hard work led by AWS, the Beta release was announced earlier this month under Apache2 license. On this episode of OpenObservability Talks I hosted Kyle Davis, Senior Developer Advocate for OpenSearch at AWS. We talked about how OpenSearch came to be, what it took to fork Elasticsearch and Kibana, wh...
May 27, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 12
