2025-08-09 –, RB105
Observability is a buzzword. As is common with buzzwords, there's a good reason why it is so successful, but people also often use it for just anything to sound cool and knowledgeable until the word starts losing its meaning.
Let's go through the scientific definition of Observabilty, then though how humans have dealt with and optimized data since we have had written records, and then apply this knowledge in finding out how to get actionable insights from your data while keeping human effort and costs down.
初學者
Richard "RichiH" Hartmann is the Senior Developer Programs Director, a member of the Office of the CTO and a member of the OSPO of Grafana Labs. He is also Prometheus maintainer, OpenMetrics founder, OpenTelemetry member, and more. Among others, he was a CNCF Technical Oversight Committee member, a CNCF Governing Board member, the chair of the CNCF Technical Advisory Group on Observability, and other roles. He's the only one to receive the CNCF's "Chop wood, carry water" award for essential background twice. He also leads, organizes, or helps run various conferences from hundreds to 18,000 attendess, including but not limited to KubeCon, PromCon, FOSDEM, DENOG, DebConf, and Chaos Communication Congress. In the past, he made mainframe databases work, ISP backbones run, kept the largest IRC network on Earth running, and designed and built a datacenter from scratch. Go through his talks, podcasts, interviews, and articles at https://github.com/RichiH/talks or follow him on Mastodon at https://chaos.social/@RichiH for musings on the intersection of technology and society.