
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

Mar 29, 2021 • 59min
Interoperability of open-source observability and new signal in the neighborhood, profiling! - OpenObservability Talks S1E10
Join Jonah Kowall and Bartek Plotka for a discussion on the latest happening topics on open source observability. Bartek works on many projects in open source and is Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat; CNCF SIG Observability Tech Lead. He is very active in the community as one of the leaders of Prometheus, Thanos, OpenMetrics, and many other projects.

Feb 28, 2021 • 60min
How Much Observability Is Enough? - OpenObservability Talks S1E9
The ninth of our OpenObservability Talks has Jujhar Singh, Global DevSecOps Practice Lead at The Economist.
How much observability is enough? What is the investment required to achieve it? How can we drive observability in the company in a measured and pragmatic way?
This was first live-streamed on 25 February 2021 and the video is available at https://youtu.be/sR-Q3Z-YP2E
Show Notes:
How to drive observability in your organization
What is the minimum observability needed for your organization?
The tech stack impact on observability needs
Direct correlation between organization, product and observability
How to assess your observability needs
The investment involved in observability
eBPF and tools for deep Linux inspection
OpenSearch (Elasticsearch fork) status update
OpenTelemetry’s Tracing specification reaches v1.0
Stanza contributed its logging agent to OpenTelemetry
Docker was contributed to CNCF
Resources:
https://www.kiwico.com/
https://sre.google/sre-book/monitoring-distributed-systems/
https://devsecops.jujhar.com/observability-strategy/
https://devsecops.jujhar.com
Elasticsearch/Kibana fork updates: https://discuss.opendistrocommunity.dev/c/forking-elasticsearch-kibana/50
OpenTelemetry v1.0 for Tracing: https://medium.com/opentelemetry/opentelemetry-specification-v1-0-0-tracing-edition-72dd08936978
Donating Docker Distribution to the CNCF: https://www.docker.com/blog/donating-docker-distribution-to-the-cncf/
Socials:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenObserv
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLKOtaBdQAJVRJqhJDuOlPg

Jan 28, 2021 • 38min
Put the OPEN in Observability: Elasticsearch and Kibana relicensing and community chat - OpenObservability Talks S1E8
The eighth of our OpenObservability Talks has Tomer Levy, CEO & Founder of Logz.io.
The community is in turmoil around Elastic's announced plan to take Elasticsearch and Kibana off open source. In this episode, both Dotan and Mike have the pleasure of hosting Tomer where we discuss the recent news of Elastic moving Elasticsearch and Kibana to a dual non-OSS license - SSPL and Elastic License - and the implications that have on the open source community around it, including plans to fork Elasticsearch and Kibana, AWS announcement and more. We also talk about what Logz.io hopes to do, and how it wants the OSS to be better than ever.
Tomer Levy is co-founder and CEO of Logz.io. Before founding Logz.io, Tomer was the co-founder and CTO of Intigua, and prior to that he managed the Intrusion Prevention System at CheckPoint. Tomer has an M.B.A. from Tel Aviv University and a B.S. in computer science and is an enthusiastic kitesurfer.
The live streaming of the OpenObservability Talks is on the last Thursday of each month, and you can join us on Twitch or YouTube Live.
Socials:
Website: https://openobservability.io/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenObserv
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLKOtaBdQAJVRJqhJDuOlPg

Dec 31, 2020 • 44min
An Observability chat with Andy Thurai - OpenObservability Talks S1E7
The seventh of our OpenObservability Talks has Andy Thurai, Senior Analyst at GigaOM.
Jonah Kowall, CTO and Andy Thurai will talk about Andy's career and journey as a vendor and an analyst. We will discuss the observability market along with APM and other aspects of monitoring. We will then dive into the open-source ecosystem and how this is changing vendor thinking. Of course, we'll also be discussing OpenTelemetry!
Andy Thurai is the Founder & Principal at the FieldCTO providing content and advisory services to enterprise customers in particular on AIOps, CloudOps, AI, ML, and Observability areas.
He is an accomplished IT executive, strategist, advisor and evangelist with 25+ years of experience in executive, technical and architectural leadership positions at companies such as IBM, Intel, BMC, Nortel and Oracle; he advises many start-ups, and he is a Steering Committee Member for AIOps Exchange. He has been a keynote speaker in many major conferences, as well as a host of many webcasts, podcasts and video chats. He is a regular Forbes contributor and has written 100+ articles on emerging technology topics for publications such as Forbes, AI World, VentureBeat and Wired. Andy Thurai can be reached on Twitter at @AndyThurai, or on LinkedIn.
This was first streamed at https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability on December 29th and the full video is available at https://youtu.be/Hr4lGqLiMa0
The live streaming of the OpenObservability Talks is on the last Thursday of each month, and you can join us on Twitch or YouTube Live.
Socials:
Website: https://openobservability.io/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenObserv
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLKOtaBdQAJVRJqhJDuOlPg

Nov 29, 2020 • 1h 13min
All Metrics Are Wrong, Some Are Useful - OpenObservability Talks S1E6
The sixth of our OpenObservability Talks has Avishai Ish-Shalom, Developer Advocate at ScyllaDB.
We trust our metrics to show us the status of our system and where it misbehaves. But do our metrics show us what really happened? You'd be surprised how often it's not the case.
On this episode we discussed the math behind metrics, some common misconceptions, what it take to have accurate metrics, and if there even is such a thing.
Avishai Ish-Shalom has served as Engineer in Residence in Aleph VC, engineering manager at Wix.com, co-founded Fewbytes and consulted many other companies on software operations, reliability, design and culture. Currently Avishai is a Developer Advocate for ScyllaDB, the open source NoSQL database.
This was first streamed at https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability on November 26th and the full video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9hpWv7fVSk
The live streaming of the OpenObservability Talks is on the last Thursday of each month, and you can join us on Twitch or YouTube Live.
Socials:
Website: https://openobservability.io/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenObserv
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLKOtaBdQAJVRJqhJDuOlPg
Links Shared in the recording:
DevOps Pulse 2020
Engineer's guide to data analysis
Mature optimization handbook
The art of monitoring
SRE books

Oct 31, 2020 • 58min
Microservices Observability for Developers and Pre-Production - OpenObservability Talks S1E5
The fifth of our OpenObservability Talks has Michael Haberman, CTO & Co-Founder of Aspecto.
There's a lot of discussion on how to achieve observability in microservices. Most of the discussion revolves around production workflows such as granular monitoring or debugging of complex environments.
A much less discussed aspect is the development stage, before even reaching production. In this talk we will discuss the challenges of microservices environments, and how to leverage tracing for pre-production purposes such as improving your tests, understand dependencies and more.
Michael Haberman is a veteran in the microservices space and brings significant experience as a software architect and a consultant. Michael shared his experience on achieving observability in microservices environments in general, and during development stages in particular, with some useful tips on how to solve production issues, before they reach production.
This was first streamed at https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability on October 29th and the full video is available at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLKOtaBdQAJVRJqhJDuOlPg
The live recording of the OpenObservability talks is the last Thursday of each month, and you can join us on Twitch or YouTube Live.
Socials:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenObserv
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLKOtaBdQAJVRJqhJDuOlPg
Website: https://openobservability.io/
Links Shared in the recording:
OpenTelemetry's Tracing Specification Reaches Release Candidate
A new open source project: Promscale, An analytical platform and long-term store for Prometheus, with the combined power of SQL and PromQL
AWS announcing Public Preview of AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry

Sep 30, 2020 • 59min
Distributed Tracing at Uber-Scale - OpenObservability TalksS1E4
The fourth of our OpenObservability Talks has Albert Teoh from the Jaeger project.
Distributed tracing has been gaining momentum with the growing popularity of microservices. Jaeger is a popular open source tool originally developed at Uber and now part of the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation).
Albert had been working at Uber for the past 2.5 years, where he got hands-on with Jaeger. On this talk Albert will share with us his experience with distributed tracing, from introducing it into new code all the way to production. Albert will explain important concepts and considerations, and will discuss common challenges and solutions in introducing distributed tracing in an existing large scale system.
This was first streamed on 24 September 2020 and the full video is available at https://youtu.be/35aInRLbTQo
The live recording of the OpenObservability talks is the last Thursday of each month, and you can join us on Twitch or YouTube Live.
Socials:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenObserv
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLKOtaBdQAJVRJqhJDuOlPg
Resources:
why Jaeger was built by Uber Engineering: https://eng.uber.com/distributed-tracing/
Domain oriented microservice architecture: https://eng.uber.com/microservice-architecture/
Reference to resource usage attribution, from the book "Mastering Distributed Tracing" by Yuri Shkuro: https://subscription.packtpub.com/book/networking_and_servers/9781788628464/2/ch02lvl1sec28/resource-usage-attribution
CNCF published the second quarterly CNCF End User Technology Radars; the topic for this Technology Radar is observability https://www.cncf.io/blog/2020/09/11/cncf-end-user-technology-radar-observability-september-2020/
Crtex & Thanos voted into CNCF incubation https://www.cncf.io/blog/2020/08/20/toc-welcomes-cortex-as-an-incubating-project/ https://www.cncf.io/blog/2020/08/19/toc-approves-thanos-from-sandbox-to-incubation/
Kubernetes v1.19 release offers structured logs for the system components https://logz.io/blog/a-practical-guide-to-kubernetes-logging/

Aug 27, 2020 • 54min
Long-Term Metrics with M3 and Prometheus - OpenObservability Talks S1E3
Episode 3 of OpenObservability Talks, where we'll be hosting Matt Schallert of Chronosphere. The topic for this episode is Long-Term Metrics with M3 and Prometheus.
Prometheus is the de facto solution when getting started with metrics, supporting use cases where a single node can store the entire dataset. When it comes to scaling out workloads or storing long-term data, Prometheus offers the Remote Write and Read interfaces to integrate with other storage solutions.
In this talk, Matt will show attendees how they can scale their existing Prometheus metrics workloads with M3, an open-source metrics platform originated at Uber. Matt will discuss the background of Prometheus’s remote storage interfaces, and how they enable users to integrate with any number of systems they’re familiar with. He will demonstrate how quickly users can get an M3 stack up and running and integrate it with Prometheus.
The audience will walk away with a better understanding of the challenges of effectively scaling their metrics workloads, and how they can overcome these challenges with open source tools such as M3.
This was first streamed at https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability on August 27th and the full video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQ_yCLyAMLU
Links Shared in the recording:
M3 Virtual Meetup https://www.meetup.com/M3-Community/
M3 Slack Community https://bit.ly/m3slack
If you have a talk or a subject you'd like to talk about send it here https://forms.gle/pTVwDMCP1fK32tAF9
Socials:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenObserv
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability
Website: https://openobservability.io/

Jul 30, 2020 • 1h 11min
A chat with Paul Bruce and Jonah Kowall about the OpenTelemetry community - OpenObservability Talks S1E2
Episode 2 of OpenObservability Talks, where we'll be hosting Paul Bruce of Neotys and Jonah Kowall of Logz.io. Our topic of discussion today is OpenTelemetry and the thriving community around it.
This was first streamed at https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability on July 30th and the full video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtxYgT-mopY
If you have a talk or a subject you'd like to talk about send it here https://forms.gle/pTVwDMCP1fK32tAF9
Socials:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenObserv
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability
Website: https://openobservability.io/

Jun 29, 2020 • 40min
Five Tips on Application Monitoring with Prometheus - OpenObservability Talks S1E1
Welcome to the first-ever OpenObservability Talks!
This was first streamed at https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability on June 25th and the full video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Otb57MNZfKA
You'll get an introduction to the series, a talk by Jack Neely of 42 Lines on Five Tips on Application Monitoring with Prometheus, and a run-through of current events in the world of Open Source Observability and the things that affect it.
If you'd like to submit a session for a later event then just drop it in the CFP here https://forms.gle/Le691dn7CU35GwKq7
Socials:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenObserv
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLKOtaBdQAJVRJqhJDuOlPg
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability
Website: https://openobservability.io/