GC - #33 Cloud Native Monitoring and Observability

Jun 12, 2025

Dominik Schmidle, a Product Manager at Giant Swarm, dives into the world of cloud-native monitoring and observability. He explains why these concepts are essential for DevOps, shifting focus from traditional monitoring to a more holistic approach. The conversation touches on Grafana 12's exciting new features, including improved alerting and enhanced drill-down capabilities. Dominik also discusses the significance of OpenTelemetry in shaping observability tools and emphasizes the challenges of developing a comprehensive cloud-native observability platform.

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INSIGHT

Observability vs Monitoring

Observability uses metrics, logs, and traces to provide a comprehensive view of system health.
Monitoring focuses mainly on metrics to understand system health at specific points in time.

ADVICE

Get Metrics and Logs Right

Use Prometheus to scrape metrics like CPU usage from your app endpoints.
Employ log streams to capture events, adapting your approach based on the data type.

INSIGHT

Interpreting Metrics Spikes

Spikes in metrics like CPU usage don't always need action; they can be expected and manageable.
Robust systems scale and self-heal to handle these typical spikes safely.

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IYKYK - Join us as we talk to Dominik Schmidle about the Giant Swarm Observability Platform.

Giant Conversations Episode #33

Topic: Monitoring and Observability

Hosted by:

Tommy Hobin

Special Guest: Dominik Schmidle

Monitoring and Observability for Beginners

Start with the basics: NOT what is Monitoring and Observability - why is monitoring and observability important for DevOps? What is an example?

Monitoring and Observability in the News

Observability is evolving: 2025 observability is less about shiny graphs and more about getting answers faster, safely, and at scale.

Grafana 12 release (May 07 2025): Observability as Code, Grafana Alerting improvements, Grafana Drilldown General Availability, and more

Key enhancements:

Git Sync: experimental support to version-control dashboards and folders via Git from within Grafana, including branch and PR workflows
CLI tool (grafanactl): manage, pull, push, validate Grafana resources from the command line
Alerting Improvements: Tool to import Prometheus/Loki alert rules into Grafana-managed alerts, preserving original behavior
Grafana Drilldown (Explore Metrics, Logs & Traces) moved to GA

OpenTelemetry + Grafana Labs roadmap (May 20 2025)

OpenTelemetry pushed stable, turn-key Spring Boot instrumentation and added resource-aware Prometheus export, so labels like k8s.node.name flow straight into Prom dashboards.

Monitoring and Observability at Giant Swarm

Did our first Talk about how we created the Product on "Mastering Observability" Conference!
Topic was Observability Platform @ Scale and which challenges we faced when scaling
Interesting: Most problems when scaling were organizational instead of technical (observability as a product)
ie. one problem: What's actually our product and what's our interface to the customer?
ie. second problem: The Vision of the Observability Platform - where do we want to go with it -> Longterm Roadmap
Now working on the roadmap! What progress?
We worked a lot on our Multi-Tenancy concept based on Grafana Organisations that allows us to onboard a customers marketing team into the observability platform!
We connect GitOps and ClickOps in Grafana - managing a persisted Grafana with GitOps Resources (Dashboards and Orgs) loaded in, so people can create those resources in the way the like best.
Getting AI into the observability platform: directions and reviews!

Next Podcast

AI Event: AI for Infrastructure - How Will AI Change the Life of a Platform Engineer? Giant Swarm CTO, Timo Derstappen will walk us through the event while going over questions from our audience.