
OpenObservability Talks
On OpenObservability Talks we discuss harnessing the power of open source to advance observability initiatives for developers, DevOps and SRE practitioners around the world.
We live-stream the episodes on Twitch and YouTube Live - tune in to see us live, and chime in with your comments and questions on the live chat.
https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks
You can find us on X (Twitter) @openobserv and BlueSky @openobservability.bsky.social
Latest episodes

Nov 23, 2022 • 1h
Meta’s data driven approach to observability - OpenObservability Talks S3E06
At Meta (Facebook, Instragram et al) everything is data, and data driven approach is the rule, from product to engineering, from HR to finance. This is also how the team at Meta treats observability. Let’s see how we treat observability as a data analytics problem, and what you can implement, even if you’re not a hyperscaler.
On this episode I’ll host David Ostrovsky from Meta. David is a software developer with over 20 years of industry experience, speaker, trainer, blogger and co-author of “Pro Couchbase Server”. He specializes in large-scale distributed system architecture.
The episode was live-streamed on 7 November 2022 and the video is available at https://youtu.be/1l0HKUDoX4Q
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.
We live-stream the episodes on Twitch and YouTube Live - tune in to see us live, and chime in with your comments and questions on the live chat.https://www.twitch.tv/openobservabilityhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLKOtaBdQAJVRJqhJDuOlPg
Have you got an interesting topic you'd like to share in an episode? Reach out to us and submit your proposal at https://openobservability.io/
Show Notes:
Addressing business observability
Machine learning and predictions in observability
From the business inwards, using SLOs
Accelerate engineering quality with developer observability
Organizational and communications aspects of high scale observability
Actionable observability
How small-medium size orgs can achieve a similar effect
OpenTelemetry demo is GA
PromLens is open sourced and contributed to Prometheus
Resources:
TEMPLE signals for observability: https://medium.com/@YuriShkuro/temple-six-pillars-of-observability-4ac3e3deb402
PromLens open sourced: https://promlabs.com/blog/2022/10/25/promlabs-and-chronosphere-open-source-the-promlens-query-builder
Socials:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenObserv
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLKOtaBdQAJVRJqhJDuOlPg

8 snips
Oct 27, 2022 • 58min
Platform Engineering: DevOps evolution or a fancy rename? - OpenObservability Talks S3E05
Everyone’s talking about Platform Engineering these days. Even Gartner featured it in its Hype Cycle for Software Engineering 2022. But what is Platform Engineering really about? Is it the next stage in the evolution of DevOps? Is it just a fancy rebrand for DevOps or SRE? And how does observability pertain to platform engineering?
On this episode of OpenObservability Talks Horovits hosted George Hantzaras, Director of Cloud Platform Engineering at Citrix. George is a distributed systems expert and a hands-on engineering leader with focus on delivering B2B cloud services at scale. Coming from a DevOps background, he focuses on implementing SRE at enterprise scale working with cloud native technologies. He has been organizing the Athens Cloud Computing Meetup since 2016 and the Athens Hashicorp User Group. Most recently, he has been a speaker at global events like Hashiconf, DeveloperWeek, Voxxed Days, DevNexus and more, focusing on reliability engineering, agile leadership, scaling engineering teams, and entrepreneurship.
The episode was live-streamed on 6 October 2022 and the video is available at https://youtu.be/zJGMUVY6fDM
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.
We live-stream the episodes on Twitch and YouTube Live - tune in to see us live, and chime in with your comments and questions on the live chat.https://www.twitch.tv/openobservabilityhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLKOtaBdQAJVRJqhJDuOlPg
Have you got an interesting topic you'd like to share in an episode? Reach out to us and submit your proposal at https://openobservability.io/
Show Notes:
Why Platform Engineering?
Different teams employ different stacks. How does Platform Engineering fits in?
Platform Engineering at Citrix
How does it map to the common DevOps maturity models?
Is Platform Engineering different from PaaS?
Platform as a product
Culture element is central in Platform Engineering
Generating buy-in within the product’s engineering
Metrics and quantifying the benefits of Platform Engineering
Balancing flexibility and simplicity, and striking the right level of abstraction
Delimitation between what’s developed by Platform vs. Product teams.
Generating Golden Paths for engineering
Observability and Platform Engineering
Resources:
George Hantzaras presentations
Designing Golden Paths
platformengineering.org
Platform Engineering KPIs
Socials:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenObserv
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLKOtaBdQAJVRJqhJDuOlPg

Sep 29, 2022 • 1h
Where Are My App’s Traces?? Instrumentation in Practice - OpenObservability Talks S3E04
Instrumentation is that black magic that makes our application emit traces, logs, metrics or other telemetry. How does it work? What options are available in different programming languages, such as Java, Python and Go? What does OpenTelemetry offer in this domain?
On this episode of OpenObservability Talks I hosted Eden Federman, Co-Founder & CTO at keyval, a company focused on making observability simpler. Eden is the creator of two open source projects: Odigos and Go automatic instrumentation (now part of OpenTelemetry). Eden is passionate about everything related to observability and performance monitoring. He also created kubectl-flame, a profiler for Kubernetes.
The episode was live-streamed on 22 September 2022 and the video is available at https://youtu.be/VFykWV1mLAI
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.
We live-stream the episodes on Twitch and YouTube Live - tune in to see us live, and chime in with your comments and questions on the live chat.https://www.twitch.tv/openobservabilityhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLKOtaBdQAJVRJqhJDuOlPg
Have you got an interesting topic you'd like to share in an episode? Reach out to us and submit your proposal at https://openobservability.io/
Show Notes:
What is instrumentation
Manual and Automatic instrumentation
Different languages offer different options
Java instrumentation capabilities
Go instrumentation capabilities
Instrumentation when using programming frameworks
eBPF use in auto-instrumentation
New OpenTelemetry SIG for Go auto-instrumentation
Odigos open source project
Best practices for instrumentation
Resources:
Instrumentation basics and OpenTelemetry support
eBPF Automatic instrumentation for Go
Odigos (Observability Control Plane)
OpenTelemetry Go auto instrumentation SIG
How OpenTelemetry works under the hood in JavaScript
Spring Boot instrumentation
Spring Cloud Sleuth 1.1.0 released
Socials:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenObserv
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks

Aug 25, 2022 • 56min
SigNoz: Open-source observability with Pranay - OpenObservability Talks S3E03
In this episode, hosted by Jonah Kowall we are excited to introduce Pranay Prateek the co-founder and creator of SigNoz to the audience. He is an entrepreneur who has been building an interesting and exciting open-source observability platform. The goal is a unified interface and data storage system which is scalable and manageable much more easily than today’s disjointed open-source tools. SigNoz has a goal of unifying tracing, metrics, and logging in a single platform and interface. We’ll dig into the evolution of this unique project from its creation until today, along with the adoption of the technology and contribution from the community. We will discuss the data architecture and their move from Druid towards ClickHouse, which is always a fascinating topic. Finally, we’ll elaborate on the future of SigNoz and where things are going with the project. Join me, Jonah Kowall, as I speak with Pranay Prateek on this episode of OpenObservability Talks.
The podcast episodes are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on this YouTube channel.
Socials:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenObserv
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks

5 snips
Jul 28, 2022 • 1h
Expensive Observability: The Cardinality Challenge - OpenObservability Talks S3E02
We all collect logs, metrics and perhaps traces and other data types, in support of our observability. But this can get expensive pretty quickly, especially in microservices based systems, in what is commonly known as “the cardinality problem”.
On this episode of OpenObservability Talks I’ll host Ben Sigelman, co-founder and the GM of Lightstep, to discuss this data problem and how to overcome it. Ben architected Google’s own planet-scale metrics and distributed tracing systems (still in production today), and went on to co-create the open-source OpenTracing and OpenTelemetry projects, both part of the CNCF.
The episode was live-streamed on 12 July 2022 and the video is available at https://youtu.be/gJhzwP-mZ2k
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.
We live-stream the episodes on Twitch and YouTube Live - tune in to see us live, and pitch in with your comments and questions on the live chat.https://www.twitch.tv/openobservabilityhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLKOtaBdQAJVRJqhJDuOlPg
Have you got an interesting topic you'd like to share in an episode? Reach out to us and submit your proposal at https://openobservability.io/
Show Notes:
The difference between monitoring, observability and APM
What comprises the cost of observability
How common is the knowledge of cardinality and how to add metrics
Controlling cost with sampling, verbosity and retention
Lessons from Google’s metrics and tracing systems
Using metric rollups and aggregations intelligently
Semantic conventions for logs, metrics and traces
OpenCost project
New research paper by Meta on schema-first approach to application telemetry metadata
OTEL code contributions - published stats
Resources:
Monitoring vs. observability: https://twitter.com/el_bhs/status/1349406398388400128
The two drivers of cardinality: https://twitter.com/el_bhs/status/1360276734344450050
Sampling vs verbosity: https://twitter.com/el_bhs/status/1440750741384089608
Observing resources and transactions: https://twitter.com/el_bhs/status/1372636288021524482
Socials:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenObserv
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLKOtaBdQAJVRJqhJDuOlPg

Jun 28, 2022 • 1h 1min
OpenTelemetry and the Vision for Unified Open Observability - OpenObservability Talks S3E01
OpenTelemetry is one of the most fascinating and ambitious open source projects of this era. It’s currently the second most active project in the CNCF (the Cloud Native Computing Foundation), with only Kubernetes being more active. The entire industry is aligning behind this project, including incumbent monitoring vendors that were deeply vested in proprietary and closed-source agents to that end.
In this episode of OpenObservability Talks I’ll host Alolita Sharma to discuss OpenTelemetry, its origins and mission statement, as well as updates hot off the press from the recent KubeCon conference in Valencia about releases and future plans.
Alolita is co-chair of the CNCF Technical Advisory Group for Observability, member of the OpenTelemetry Governance Committee and a board director of the Unicode Consortium. She has served on the boards of the OSI and SFLC.in. Alolita has led engineering teams at Wikipedia, Twitter, PayPal, IBM and AWS. Two decades of doing open source continue to inspire her.
The episode was live-streamed on 15 June 2022 and the video is available at https://youtu.be/IK2TWOzDUBI
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.
We live-stream the episodes on Twitch and YouTube Live - tune in to see us live, and pitch in with your comments and questions on the live chat.https://www.twitch.tv/openobservabilityhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLKOtaBdQAJVRJqhJDuOlPg
You can read the recap post: https://logz.io/blog/opentelemetry-roadmap-and-latest-updates/?utm_source=devrel&utm_medium=devrel
Show Notes:
Hot updates from KubeCon EMEA 2022
Alolita Sharma introduction
The state of OpenTelemetry
When OpenTelemetry Logging is expecting GA
The onboarding challenge of instrumentation
Client side instrumentation and real user monitoring
Adding continuous profiling telemetry to OpenTelemetry
Interoperability between OpenTelemetry and Prometheus
Challenges in OpenTelemetry and observability
Where OpenTelemetry is heading next
Jaeger OSS now accept OTLP (OpenTelemetry protocol)
Resources:
OpenTelemetry Metrics reaches RC: https://opentelemetry.io/blog/2022/metrics-announcement/
OpenTelemetry guide: https://logz.io/learn/opentelemetry-guide/
CI/CD Observability: https://horovits.medium.com/fighting-slow-and-flaky-ci-cd-pipelines-starts-with-observability-19da2ac94677
Jaeger can now accept OpenTelemetry protocol https://medium.com/jaegertracing/introducing-native-support-for-opentelemetry-in-jaeger-eb661be8183c
OTel Community Day summary: http://paulsbruce.io/blog/2022/06/opentelemetry-community-day-austin-2022
Contextual Logging in Kubernetes 1.24 https://kubernetes.io/blog/2022/05/25/contextual-logging/
PolarSignals announced FrostDB https://www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2022/05/04/introducing-arcticdb/
Socials:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenObserv
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLKOtaBdQAJVRJqhJDuOlPg
Dotan Horovits
============
Twitter: @horovits
LinkedIn: in/horovits
Mastodon: @horovits@fosstodon
Alolita Sharma
============
Twitter: @alolita
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alolita/

May 26, 2022 • 59min
Observability for Developers Demystified - OpenObservability Talks E2E12
Developers hate monitoring, but we need it. We need it in many points of the software development lifecycle: before deprecating an API, before launching a new feature, after launching the feature, and more. In fact, monitoring needs can vary much more than the classic Ops monitoring.
In this episode I’ll host Liran Haimovitch to discuss how to determine what developers should be monitoring, the difference between observability for Dev and for Ops, and how observability fits into our current dev tools, dev stack and dev processes.
Liran is the Co-Founder and CTO of Rookout. He’s an Observability and Instrumentation expert with a deep understanding of Java, Python, Node, and C++. Liran has broad experience in cybersecurity and compliance from his past roles. When not coding, you can find Liran hosting his podcast, speaking at conferences, writing about his tech adventures, and trying out the local cuisine when traveling.
The episode was live-streamed on 10 May 2022 and the video is available at https://youtu.be/OaHQp-qnVN0
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.
We live-stream the episodes on Twitch and YouTube Live - tune in to see us live, and pitch in with your comments and questions on the live chat.https://www.twitch.tv/openobservabilityhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLKOtaBdQAJVRJqhJDuOlPg
Have you got an interesting topic you'd like to share in an episode? Reach out to us and submit your proposal at https://openobservability.io/
Show Notes:
Which data do we need to collect for our observability
How is observability for dev different from ops
How does observability fit into dev tool stack
Snapshots provide deep-dive telemetry signal
Dynamic instrumentation
Snapshots support in programming languages and runtimes
Open source standardization around snapshots
The cost associated with observability
Google is applying to contribute Istio to the CNCF
Shopify case study for observability team
Resources:
Istio applying to the CNCF: https://istio.io/latest/blog/2022/istio-has-applied-to-join-the-cncf/
Shopify case study for Observability team: https://ericmustin.substack.com/p/notes-on-an-observability-team?s=r
Socials:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenObserv
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLKOtaBdQAJVRJqhJDuOlPg

Apr 28, 2022 • 1h 1min
OpenSearch 2.0 and beyond with Eli - OpenObservability Talks E2E11
OpenSearch is a community-driven, open-source search and analytics suite derived from Apache 2.0 licensed Elasticsearch 7.10.2 & Kibana 7.10.2. The OpenSearch project started just over a year ago and is now the open-source alternative to ELK, which is no longer open source. The team has spent much of the last year getting the project going, but there was innovation as well. We will cover and discuss what OpenSearch has accomplished, but more importantly what’s coming next, including a big 2.0 release. We are joined in this episode by Eli Fisher, who is the product lead at AWS, working on the OpenSearch project. He’ll dive into recent launches, including several observability features, and innovations planned for 2.0 and beyond.
The podcast episodes are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on this YouTube channel.
We live-stream the episodes, and you’re welcome to join the stream here on YouTube Live or at https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability.

Mar 30, 2022 • 60min
SLO Driven Engineering: from Dev to Prod - OpenObservability Talks S2E10
Google’s SRE Book popularized the concept of Service Level Objective (SLO) and the SLO-driven approach. But what does it really mean to make SLO driven decisions? How can we generate observability and synchronize teams around joint SLOs? And how can we automate SLOs and integrate them into the software release pipeline?
In this episode I’ll host Andreas Grabner. We’ll discuss the SRE practices, and how to automate SLO from dev all the way to prod. We’ll talk about the open source efforts to standardize the process under the Continuous Delivery Foundation, and about Keptn, the new CNCF open source project that promises to help with this automation.
Andreas Grabner (@grabnerandi) has 20+ years of experience as a software developer, tester and architect and is an advocate for high-performing cloud scale applications. He is a contributor and DevRel for the CNCF open source project keptn (www.keptn.sh). Andreas is also a regular contributor to the DevOps community, a frequent speaker at technology conferences and regularly publishes articles on blog.dynatrace.com or medium. In his spare time you can most likely find him on one of the salsa dancefloors of the world.
The episode was live-streamed on 15 March 2022 and the video is available at https://youtu.be/J81byOpVqrk
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.
We live-stream the episodes on Twitch and YouTube Live - tune in to see us live, and pitch in with your comments and questions on the live chat.https://www.twitch.tv/openobservabilityhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLKOtaBdQAJVRJqhJDuOlPg
Show Notes:
What’s SRE
Where is SRE placed in the organization
SRE vs. DevOps
Good and bad SLOs
How to define SLOs top-down
Who owns SLO definition, monitoring, remediation
Where is SRE within less mature organizations
Keptn OSS project background
Who uses and contributes to Keptn project
What’s the CDF (Continuous Delivery Foundation)
Creating a standard CD event format under the CDF (CDF Events SIG)
Cloud Native Observability survey by the CNCF
Resources:
SLO in the age of microservices:
Keptn OSS project: https://keptn.sh/
Keptn 0.14.0 major release
TechWorld with Nana on Keptn
CD Foundation - SIG Events: https://github.com/cdfoundation/sig-events
PurePerformance podcast
Cloud Native Observability survey by the CNCF
Socials:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenObserv
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLKOtaBdQAJVR

Feb 27, 2022 • 59min
Building web-scale observability at Slack, Pinterest & Twitter - OpenObservability Talks S2E09
What does it take to build observability in a web-scale company such as Slack, Pinterest and Twitter?
On this episode of OpenObsevability Talks I'll host Suman Karumuri to hear how he built these systems from the ground up on these #BigTech co's, about his recent research papers and more.
Suman Karumuri is a Sr. Staff Software Engineer and the tech lead for Observability at Slack. Suman Karumuri is an expert in distributed tracing and was a tech lead of Zipkin and a co-author of OpenTracing standard, a Linux Foundation project via the CNCF. Previously, Suman Karumuri has spent several years building and operating petabyte scale log search, distributed tracing and metrics systems at Pinterest, Twitter and Amazon. In his spare time, he enjoys board games, hiking and playing with his kids.
The episode was live-streamed on 16 February 2022 and the video is available at https://youtu.be/IvidkV3TfYg
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.
We live-stream the episodes on Twitch and YouTube Live - tune in to see us live, and pitch in with your comments and questions on the live chat.https://www.twitch.tv/openobservabilityhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLKOtaBdQAJVRJqhJDuOlPg
Show Notes:
* Who owns observability in large organizations?
* The gaps in current way of handling metrics
* MACH research paper for metrics storage engine
* The gaps in current way of handling logs Slack KalDB
* SlackTrace - Slack in house tracing system
Resources:
Research paper: building Observability Data Management Systems
CIDR paper: Video
SlackTrace blog post, talk.
Logging at Twitter
Pintrace: A Distributed Tracing Pipeline talk by Suman at LISA
Observability Engineering book
Observability Trends for 2022
Yelp engineering with Elasticsearch and Lucene
Socials:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenObserv
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLKOtaBdQAJVRJqhJDuOlPg