The Velocity conference happened recently, and as part of it we (Honeycomb) hosted a sort of reverse-panel discussion, where you talked, and we listened. You may be aware that we’re in the process of developing a maturity model for the practice of observability–and we’re taking every opportunity we have to ask questions and get feedback from those of you who are somewhere along the path.

A lot of product marketing is about telling people to throw away what they have in favor of something entirely new. Sometimes that is the right answer–sometimes what you have has completely outlived its usefulness and you need to put something better in its place–but a lot of the time, what’s realistic is to make incremental improvements. If you’ve been tasked with starting, or growing your observability practice, it may seem a long journey from here to there.

(Field notes from O’Reilly’s Velocity 2019 Show, San Jose.) It was steamy hot in San Jose during O’Reilly’s Velocity show and the normally frigid AC temps in the expo hall were welcomed by all attendees, escaping the 104 degree temps. It got so bad, Charity Majors labeled it Satan Jose and the nearby Marriott hotel experienced a power outage for almost two full days, leaving guests hot under more than just their collars.

Observability-driven development requires both rich query capabilities and sufficient instrumentation in order to capture the nuances of developers’ intention and useful dimensions of cardinality. When our systems are running in containers, we need an equivalent to our local debugging tools that is as easy to use as Printf and as powerful as gdb.

This year was my third in a row attending (and now speaking at!) Monitorama. Because the organizers do a great job of turning introverts into extroverts for three days straight, it’s always a fun and exhausting time—but one of my favorite parts is how much folks continue talking about and sharing the content, days or weeks after it’s over. So, to continue the drumbeat, here were some of my highlights from this year.

Monitorama is the event of the year if you’re in the monitoring and observability space! It’s an inclusive event for speakers, attendees, and vendors alike to network and learn from each other in a safe, comfortable, and accessible environment.

Access to observability is becoming critical to organizations shipping software, running modern infrastructures in production, and to understanding how users are experiencing their service. To achieve success in delivering a complex service, it’s no longer optional to instrument for real visibility and ease of troubleshooting, to optimize alerting to enable a focused response, to do what is needed to drive toward real understanding and ownership of the code we deliver.

The three pillars of observability – monitoring, logging and tracing – are so 2018. At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU last week, Grafana Labs VP Product Tom Wilkie and Red Hat Software Engineer Frederic Branczyk, gave a keynote presentation about the future of observability and how this trifecta will evolve in 2019 and the years to come.

Hello, Checkly community and Monitoring as Code (MaC) aficionados! We have some exhilarating news that we can't wait to share. Our mascot is sporting sunglasses today because Checkly has been named in Gartner®'s 2023 Cool Vendors in Monitoring and Observability: Where Awareness Meets Understanding report!