Observabilitywhaaat? .conf21 Must Watch ITOps and DevOps Sessions

According to a recent McKinsey survey COVID-19 has sped up the adoption of digital technologies by several years. We increased customer demand for online purchasing/services by an acceleration factor of x27! We also increased the migration of assets to the cloud by x24.

The consequence is that the average share of customer digital interactions with organizations within EMEA has moved from 18% in 2017 to 55% in 2020. More than half of our businesses now rely on digital transactions, and those transactions are now using the cloud and microservices. According to a recent O’Reilly’s report, 77% of respondents have adopted microservices, with 92% experiencing success with microservices.

IT Operations and DevOps teams etc have done a great job to accelerate this digital transformation, leveraging microservices flexible architecture on top of cloud infrastructures like containers and microservices. The urgency has been to move demand from physical interactions to digital transactions and you’ve already done that! While this new approach brings a lot of flexibility, it is now time to look at how we can consolidate, stabilize, and better understand these new architectures. It’s time to make them more observable, transform the unknown unknowns (those metrics, events, logs, and traces generated by a highly ephemeral and distributed environment) into known knowns for our monitoring tools. Time to find the real equilibrium of DevOps. Check out the following .conf21 sessions to help you with that. 

How to Make Your Environment More Observable

DVO1111C - Getting Started With Splunk Observability
Observability has three pillars (Traces, Metrics, Logs), many moving parts so it can be overwhelming to get started. We will walk you through the Splunk Observability Application Performance Monitoring (APM) initial steps, starting from downloading a sample application from git all the way to seeing the telemetry reported on the Splunk Observability Cloud platform.

DVO1377B Observability from the ground up: using OpenTelemetry and Splunk APM at Care.com
In early 2020, Care.com embarked on a platform modernization effort to move from monolithic applications to microservices. It was decided from the beginning that observability would be a first-class principle in the new architecture. With the announcement of OpenTracing and OpenCensus merging into a new standard named OpenTelemetry, and an invitation to become an early adopter of Splunk APM, this became an opportunity to build observability into the new platform architecture. Learn how Care.com built custom instrumentation libraries for our gRPC and Lambda services using opentelemetry-go and the importance of context propagation to enable end-to-end tracing between services running in Kubernetes and managed services like Lambdas.

DVO1312B - Debating Logs vs. Traces: Lessons Learned Adopting Distributed Tracing At Shopify 
In the five years since Shopify began rolling out distributed tracing to production environments, they’ve encountered many misunderstandings about its value, how it works and when to use it. Software engineers are comfortable with metrics and traditional APM suites yet often rely on logs as the source of truth and default signal for debugging applications. Shopify engineering is known for shipping new features at extreme scales, and that has left little time for developers to explore new tools that may help them answer questions and resolve problems faster as Shopify’s architecture evolves from a monolith to an increasingly large constellation of services. Join Shopify’s Francis Bogsanyi, production engineering lead and Splunk’s Joshua Grose, senior product manager, as they debate logging vs. tracing and dive into common misconceptions, past mistakes, and how Shopify is working on teaching developers when and how to use tracing, and why.

DVO1822C - I Have Splunk Cloud Platform. What Can I Do to Add Observability?
As a Splunk Cloud Platform user or admin, you're using Splunk to monitor aspects of your infrastructure and custom applications, and perform investigations when things don't quite work. But the more cloud-native infrastructure and applications you're using, the more complex collecting, indexing and analyzing that data has become. In this fast-paced session, we'll outline three key ways to augment how you're using Splunk Cloud Platform to collect cloud-native data more easily, accelerate and simplify alerting, and add context to data so triage and troubleshooting are easier and faster. We'll focus on ways to augment infrastructure monitoring, use synthetic monitoring to gain better top-level monitoring data that reflects user experience, and look to observability principles to take a service-oriented view into your systems while instrumenting applications to supply insight into their availability, usage and performance.

How to Better Monitor a Now Observable Environment

DVO1603B - The Challenges and Solutions for Modern Infrastructure Monitoring and Troubleshooting
As cloud-native infrastructure rapidly proliferates, ITOps, DevOps and SRE teams face a sprawling complexity in their environment. It makes easier, faster, more reliable and scalable infrastructure monitoring and troubleshooting even more critical...

ITO1085C - Fast Pass to Getting Started with Splunk for IT Operations Use Cases
Get a deep dive into how best to leverage logs and metrics to monitor key data sources from your on-prem or cloud environments. From system health to system availability, this session will demonstrate the various ways you can get started with monitoring using log data across different platforms such as Linux, Windows, VMWare and cloud (AWS) and how to augment monitoring dashboards with metrics and host metadata. You will come away knowing how to get all the information you need in one place to speed up troubleshooting.

ITO1233B - Gain Real-Time Insights into SAP with Splunk IT Service Intelligence and PowerConnect
Do you have SAP systems? Are you looking for a better way to manage the performance of these critical services that run your business? Join this session to learn how to unlock the value of rich technical, security and business data inside SAP with Splunk and PowerConnect from the experts at SoftwareOne. SoftwareOne the developer of PowerConnect software, which is the only SAP Certified SAP to Splunk connector in the market today. You’ll get direct insights into: - Monitoring SAP performance and setting up code profiling - How to correlate SAP telemetry and logs in the application infrastructure - How to identify SAP security risks - A demo of end-to-end business process monitoring for an Order to Cash process inside SAP.

OK My System is Observable, and I Can Properly Monitor and Troubleshoot It…Now What?

ITO1662C - Understanding Why Your Business Tomorrow Needs AIOps Today
Digital transformations, cloud journeys, and DevOps adoption have accelerated in all sectors over the past year. IT organizations are often struggling to effectively keep up with the pace of change; driven by accelerating demand for new features, customer experiences and business process improvements. In this talk, we'll highlight the key business considerations for modernizing from your legacy tool chest and implementing an integrated system of tools designed to empower your teams to manage more than they ever thought possible. We'll go even further and discuss how AIOps systems can work in conjunction with key business KPIs to ensure your organization is delivering the best customer experiences and driving more business value.

ITO1617B - Using Splunk To Scale and Drive Cloud Financial Management Processes at Yelp
In this talk, come learn about how Yelp has implemented cost showback and forecast processes on the Splunk platform to scale reporting and drive predictive cloud cost analysis. You will get an in-depth look at how Yelp has maintained low budget vs. actuals variance throughout the pandemic with an agile forecasting process. You'll see exactly how to collect cost data from a vendor API via a Splunk custom command and combine it in real time with historical traffic data from Splunk APM to forecast expected changes to cost based on traffic patterns. Additionally, you'll get insights into how to increase accountability of report reviews by leveraging Splunk scheduled reports with a customer-built Jira action.

Happy Splunking & see you at .conf21!

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