DevOps .conf20 Track: To Observability and Beyond!

It’s been an exciting year for the DevOps community, and at Splunk, we’ve had quite the year in the world of DevOps. In just the last year has brought together technology and talent to be a leader in Observability and DevOps.

Last August, Splunk acquired SignalFx, a leader in infrastructure monitoring and Application Performance Monitoring.

Right after that, Splunk acquired Omnition, a leader in OpenTelemetry. OpenTelemetry is changing how telemetry is collected, especially in modern cloud infrastructure and microservices applications environments.

In parallel, Splunk has continued to innovate on the incident response front, with VictorOps continuously rolling out new capabilities that enable teams of all sizes to automate how they escalate and collaborate on incidents.

Equally important — you, the Splunk community, are making your DevOps and Observability journey — taking cloud-native approaches to monitor your clouds and modern apps at scale. That’s what the DevOps track is fundamentally about — helping you accelerate your DevOps and Observability capabilities, with Splunk and the Splunk community supporting you.

This wide-ranging track will offer a blend of thought leadership, product introductions, customer case studies, and “how-to” sessions that we believe SREs, developers, and platform/cloud operations teams will find useful and enjoyable:

• DevOps and Observability: What are the trends and best practices you need to know to maximize your success
• Infrastructure Monitoring: Rethinking the way you monitor your cloud infrastructure, with an eye towards monitoring efficiency, lightning-fast alerting, and on-point troubleshooting. Got Kubernetes? We’ll be focusing on this topic in-depth.
• Application Performance: Monitoring the availability and performance of applications and offering developers and SREs the insight they need to make quick fixes and design better applications
• Incident Response: Automating the delivery of incidents to the right teams of people, so they can identify, collaborate, and fix problems faster. 
  
  

The number of submissions were not only thoughtful and useful but numerous. Every session in the DevOps track will be sure to be interesting. Just to entice you, here are some examples of sessions that you’ll see at .conf!

APP1246B - 5 Reasons Why OpenTelemetry is the Future of Observability
It has been said that open source is eating the world, and in the observability space the project behind this movement is OpenTelemetry. While the OpenTelemetry project is new, it is a combination of two mature projects, OpenCensus and OpenTracing, and is quickly becoming the standard for instrumentation and collection of observability data. When it comes to observability, there are lots of opinions, but few answers. Understanding what data to collect and how to collect it properly is fundamental to ensuring that users have the answers they need when they need them. The OpenTelemetry approach focuses on open standards and open-source instrumentation as well as data collection. Why is an open standard and open-source approach to instrumentation and data collection so compelling? This talk will provide five reasons why OpenTelemetry is disrupting the observability market.

APP1643B - Crossing the Streams: Integrating SignalFx and Splunk
We've been using SignalFx and Splunk at Yelp for several years. In this talk, we'll walk you through how to maximize their value by leveraging these two tools together. Detecting symptoms in SignalFx and analyzing the cause in Splunk is a workflow we have embraced at Yelp with great results. Splunk enables exceptionally rich introspection into what data is ingested and how it’s used, and applying this approach to SignalFx provides new levels of insight into our deployment. This talk will help you answer questions like: How do you detect high cardinality metrics in your SignalFx usage? Would these high cardinality metrics provide more value as Splunk logs? How much does monitoring cost for my team and how do you measure usage across both these systems? Join us as we talk through lessons we’ve learned about using these two tools in tandem for the better half of a decade.

APP1571B - SignalFx at scale: we learned the hard way so you don’t have to
It’s scary to start monitoring because so many things can go wrong. You are about to open the gates to microservices and applications; how can you set yourself up for success in the long run? Starting in the right way is vital, helping you reach your goals faster and have a better observability experience. By the end of this talk you’ll know what Atlassian didn’t know when we started on this journey and what we should have done differently from the start. You will walk away with an actionable set of ideas that you can apply tomorrow, or when you approach the tipping point. I will share how we kicked off an observability culture where our users are at the center and each employee is a SignalFx expert in their own right. This as a follow up to “Feed the Beast (Splunk)” presented at Splunk .conf19, but this time we will be taking you through our experience with scaling SignalFx.

APP1894B - Microservices, a fairy tale with a “cautiously optimistic” ending
Microservices architectures, if done right, can be the backbone of rapid innovation, enabling agility and scalability. Companies are lifting and shifting their legacy applications into the cloud and refactoring them into microservices. But is it really all rainbows and unicorns? A wise person once said “We replaced our monolith with microservices so that every outage could be more like a murder mystery." In this talk, we will dive deep into the challenges in monitoring and troubleshooting microservices architectures, and learn how to use tracing instrumentation to complement infrastructure monitoring, application-level metrics and logs. You will walk away learning how to create an observability strategy for your microservices to avoid falling into the murder mystery trap.

There is so much to take in during .conf this year, especially in the DevOps track, and we can’t wait to (virtually) see you there! In the meantime, how about registering for Splunk .conf20 today. It only takes two minutes, and it’s free!

Happy Splunking,
Bill

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Thanks!
Bill Emmett