Mat invites Bartłomiej Płotka, Kemal Akkoyun & Christian Simon to discuss how to make Go code more efficient through modern observability practices.

A team without a proven observability strategy will invariably suffer from reactive disruptions; mitigating outages will be painful, like finding a needle in a haystack while blindfolded. This post describes a battle-proven strategy for ensuring full observability coverage.

eBPF is a revolutionary kernel technology that has lit the cloud native world on fire. If you’re going to have one person explain the excitement, that person would be Liz Rice. Liz is the COSO at Isovalent, creators of the open source Cilium project and pioneers of eBPF tech.

On this episode Liz tells Jerod all about the power of eBPF, where it came from, what kind of new applications its enabling, and who is building the next generation of networking, security, and observability tools with it.

This week Adam is joined by Robert Ross founder and CEO of FireHydrant — the glue layer between your tech stack and your teams to mitigate and resolve incidents at scale.

Robert shares his journey to become a software engineer, his time at DigitalOcean, this idea of incident management as a platform and how he shifted his focus from creating courses on incident management to recognizing the value of the software he was creating for the course — what is now known as FireHydrant. We also talk through his first experience in raising capital, what happens when the bar is raised on the reliability of the world’s software, and why their mantra is “Hire great people, who build, sell and market a great product, and you’ll have a great company.”

Today we are talking with Frederic Branczyk, founder of Polar Signals & Prometheus maintainer. You may remember Frederic from episode 33 when we introduced Parca.dev.

This time, we talk about a database built for observability: FrostDB, formerly known as ArcticDB. eBPF generates a lot of high cardinality data, which requires a new approach to writing, persisting & then reading back this state.

TL;DR FrostDB is sub zero cool & well worthy of its name.

This week we’re featuring an episode of Grafana’s Big Tent! LEGO Group principal engineer Nayana Shetty swaps observability survival stories (to drill or not to drill?) with hosts Mat Ryer and Matt Toback. The trio also reveals new and different observability strategies that have been successful and effective in their organizations.

Plus: Nayana shares how she built her successful observability career brick by brick.

Björn Rabenstein & Bartlomiej Płotka join Mat & Johnny to discuss observability, monitoring and instrumentation for gophers.

For the first time ever, we’re producing somebody else’s podcast! Our friends at Grafana asked us to help them launch a show for the observability community. It’s called Big Tent and on this episode we are backstage with Tom Wilkie, Mat Ryer, & Matt Toback talking through what they’re up to and why we’re helping out.

This week Adam is joined by Christine Yen, co-founder and CEO of Honeycomb. Christine and Adam recorded this show late last year, just after their Series C funding round. They talk about the superpower of observability for developers, how she and Charity Majors got to the place to found Honeycomb, the state of their platform today, what exactly observability is, and their goals for the future of Honeycomb.

B. Cameron Gain on The New Stack:

Despite an ample amount of documentation and demos made available by Grafana Labs and community members, Grafana can be a challenge to set up (although those that do get its dashboards working generally sing its praises). Many manual configurations and steps are required when installing the different dashboard options. Once installed, many users can be overwhelmed with the number of logs and other data to process for monitoring and observability.

Grafana sure does produce pretty (useful) dashboards 👇, but I do find it overwhelming at times.

In this episode, Gerhard is joined by Cyrille Le Clerc, Product Manager Lead on Observability at Elastic, and Oleg Nenashev, Principal Engineer at CloudBees.

It all started with Oleg’s tweet back in July, in which he was promoting Akihiro Kiuchi’s work on Jenkins monitoring with OpenTelemetry. This was done in the context of Google’s Summer of Code - a link to Akihiro’s demo is in the show notes.

As you may remember from episode 20, instrumenting our changelog.com pipeline is on Gerhard’s mind, and this conversation helped him clarify a few things. If you are thinking of instrumenting your CI/CD pipeline with OpenTelemetry, this episode is for you.

In the second set of interviews from KubeCon North America 2021, Gerhard and Liz Rice talk about eBPF superpowers - Cilium + Hubble - and what’s it like to work with Duffie Cooley.

Jared Watts shares the story behind Crossplane reaching incubating status, and Dan Mangum tells us what it was like to be at this KubeCon in person. Dan’s new COO role (read Click Ops Officer) comes up.

David Ansari from VMware speaks about his first KubeCon experience both as an attendee and as a speaker. The RabbitMQ Deep Dive talk that he gave will be a nice surprise if you watch it - link in the show notes.

Dan Lorenc brings his unique perspective on supply chain security, and tells us about the new company that he co-founded, Chainguard. How to secure container images gets covered, as well as one of the easter eggs that Scott Nichols put in chainguard.dev.

In which Ted Young argues that the three pillars of observability concept is fundamentally wrong.

Gerhard talks to Tom Wilkie, VP of Product for Grafana Labs. They talk about Loki, Tempo, and how can Grafana Cloud offer such a generous free tier. The solution is in the Cortex architecture, which was used in Loki and in Tempo too. Yes, Tom is the Cortex co-author. We recommend that you listen to this episode in combination with episodes 3 and 11. That’s the best way to get a more complete picture of the topics that we discuss today.

Lastly, would you like to watch Gerhard & Tom pair-up and build Grafana dashboards like pros? Tom has this really interesting approach that Gerhard would like to learn too. We can either have a live YouTube stream, or record and then publish the video. Let us know your preference via our Changelog Slack, or just plain Twitter.

Gerhard talks with Charity Majors, ops engineer and accidental startup founder at honeycomb.io about high-performing teams, why “15 minutes or bust,” and how we should start using Honeycomb in our own monolithic Phoenix app that runs changelog.com. There is just one step, and it’s actually really simple!

They also talk about how Honeycomb uses Honeycomb to learn about Honeycomb, which is one of Gerhard’s favorite questions. As for key take-aways, deploying straight into production is really important, but not as important as optimising for humans - which are not replaceable cogs, that learn and share their learnings continuously. That is the secret to making things easy and happy for everyone.

The New Stack has a solid summary of what’s new in Grafana 8. Shiny! ✨

This week on Ship It! Gerhard talks with Alex Koutmos about Elixir observability using PromEx. Why do we need to understand how our setup behaves? What is PromEx and where does PromEx fit in changelog.com?

Bonus! Tune in to our LIVE Friday evening deploy 😱 of Erlang 24 for changelog.com. Check the show notes for a link on YouTube. 🍿