Kyle Eckhart — Senior Software Engineer at Grafana Labs
Kyle Eckhart is a software engineer with over 10 years of experience in the industry. Throughout his career, he has focused heavily on designing and building data ingestion platforms, scalable APIs, creating visibility into systems, and ensuring that "just enough" (automated) processes exist. He currently works for Grafana Labs as a Senior Software Engineer, where he is the tech lead for the Cloud Provider observability team. Outside of his career, he is a father of two boys, a hiker, a mosh pit enthusiast, a board gamer, video gamer, and a yogi.
We live in a world of increasingly complex software systems. It's not often that we get to work on a simple frontend -> API -> database setup anymore. Instead, we have a massive weave of interdependent systems running on-premises, in the cloud, or even both. Given this complexity, how can we possibly:
Know how much load our systems are currently under?
Ensure a recent release is not causing instability?
Proactively be alerted to bottlenecks and unexpected errors?
Map the impact of a bottleneck to customer impact?
The world of "observability" seeks to offer us solutions to these problems, but it's not a free lunch, and there's a lot to understand. Join us on a journey through the world of observability, including:
What is observability?
What are the base "signals" used to observe applications and systems?
How can we use those signals to do amazing complex things?
There are a lot of vendors who sell observability products, but the great news is, you don't need one! We will focus heavily on principles using OpenTelemetry (https://opentelemetry.io/docs/what-is-opentelemetry/), which provides a vendor/tool-agnostic observability standard. Any examples will be done using free/OSS software, so you won't need to pay someone to build your knowledge.
- Level: Introductory and overview
- Tags: Cloud & Infrastructure, DevOps