Kubecon 2023 was more than just another conference to check off my list. It marked my first chance to work in the booth with my incredible Kentik colleagues. It let me dive deep into the code, community, and culture of Kubernetes. It was a moment when members of an underrepresented group met face-to-face and experienced an event previously not an option.

Observability isn’t just about watching for errors or monitoring for basic health signals. Instead, it goes deeper so you can understand the “why” behind the behaviors within your system. CI/CD observability plays a key part in that. It’s about gaining an in-depth view of the entire pipeline of your continuous integration and deployment systems — looking at every code check-in, every test, every build, and every deployment.

Choosing, deploying, maintaining, and rationalizing observability and monitoring tools can be a constant challenge for ITOps, DevOps, and SRE teams. As teams monitor increasingly complex systems, the need for instrumentation that monitors those systems grows at the same rate, leading directly to a growing problem of observability data engineering, integration, and enrichment.

“Isn’t observability just a fancy term for monitoring?” That’d be the response from most IT folks a few years back if you asked them about it. And here we are in 2023, where Observability now is as imperative a term as security itself.

Software systems are increasingly complex. Applications can no longer simply be understood by examining their source code or relying on traditional monitoring methods. The interplay of distributed architectures, microservices, cloud-native environments, and massive data flows requires an increasingly critical approach: observability.

ObservabilityCON 2023 took place in London this week, showcasing all the latest and greatest trends in open source observability. Following the opening keynote, the event featured a range of breakout sessions — led by both Grafana Labs experts and members of the Grafana OSS community — that explored observability best practices and lessons learned.

Organizations are constantly looking to grow and expand, which requires establishing strong foundations, especially for the IT infrastructure. The challenge in achieving this is to consistently push the limits of the IT infrastructure to deliver more business excellence. To ensure success, management operations should be fine-tuned, and this often requires improving tool sets, skillsets, and personnel.