In this special year-end episode of OpenObservability Talks, we are thrilled to host Charity Majors, co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb, for an insightful conversation on the state of observability. Charity and our host Horovits recently delivered keynotes at Open Source Observability Day, which sparked fascinating discussions on the evolution of open observability and its impact on the broader industry.

Together, they run a 2024 yearly postmortem on the key insights and trends, exploring what the observability community and industry have accomplished this year. Looking ahead, they also discuss what’s on the horizon for observability in 2025 and beyond.

Charity Majors pioneered the concept of modern Observability, drawing on her years of experience building and managing massive distributed systems at Parse (acquired by Facebook), Facebook, and Linden Lab building Second Life. She is the co-author of Observability Engineering and Database Reliability Engineering (O'Reilly). 

Join us for this fireside chat as we wrap up the year with the influential voices in observability.

The episode was live-streamed on 9 December 2024 and the video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7ssNKAmYMs

You can read the recap post at https://medium.com/p/94f80fff77e8/

OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube.

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Show Notes:

00:00 - intro

01:51 - major observability trends of 2024

05:14 - OpenTelemetry trends

07:50 - Observability 2.0

14:45 - AI for DevOps and Observability

27:02 - Platform engineering

36:37 - observability query and data analytics

43:40 - observability for business insights

46:53 - how to start observability in Greenfield projects

50:15 - additional use cases for observability

54:11 - controlling cost of observability

58:47 - outro

Resources:

Practitioner's guide to wide events: https://jeremymorrell.dev/blog/a-practitioners-guide-to-wide-events/

Charity Major's blog on Observability 2.0: https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/time-to-version-observability-signs-point-to-yes

Observability Is A Data Analytics Problem: https://insideainews.com/2022/04/07/observability-is-a-data-analytics-problem/

Platform as a Product survey by the CNCF: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:share:7267977952242397185/

SaaS observability: https://medium.com/p/b2db276305b2

Expensive Metrics: Why Your Monitoring Data and Bill Get Out Of Hand: https://medium.com/p/e5724619e3f1

Sampling best practices: https://logz.io/learn/sampling-in-distributed-tracing-guide/

Socials:

Twitter:⁠ https://twitter.com/OpenObserv⁠

YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks⁠

Dotan Horovits

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Twitter: @horovits

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/horovits

Mastodon: @horovits@fosstodon

BlueSky: @horovits.bsky.social

Charity Majors

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Twitter: https://x.com/mipsytipsy

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charity-majors

Mastodon: @mipsytipsy@hachyderm.io

BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/mipsytipsy.bsky.social