Improving Observability in Your Observability: Simple Tips for SREs

Note: Presentation times are in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

Thursday, 14 October, 2021 - 02:3003:00

Dan Shoop

Abstract: 

Would it surprise you to know that time-series data dates back hundreds of years to the early days of science, statistics, and data collection? It shouldn't when you think about it and there's plenty of good lessons learned we can re-apply to our dashboards and other engineering presentations today.

"Improving Observability In Your Observability" will present practical takeaway lessons that engineers can immediately utilize across various practices and at all levels to improve the visual understanding and credibility of their informational presentations of metrics and observability data.

As SREs interested in better presenting our telemetry we'll explore what practical lessons we can learn from the works of Galileo, Charles Joesph Minard, and Edward Tufte as well as simple pitfalls to avoid and what we can do to improve the transfer and content density of our dashboards and other engineering graphics.

Dan Shoop[node:field-speakers-institution]

Dan Shoop is a systems engineer focusing on observability, incident management, and building resilient and evolving systems architectures. He's lead SRE and Production Engineering teams for Venmo, Sesame Street, United States Technical Services, and HBO at Game of Thrones scale, where the team won a technical Emmy award for contributions to HBOGO. He's had a passion for improving the visualization and presentation of information after exploring the work of Edward Tufte and enjoys sharing lessons learned with his fellow engineers. Dan is also an avid photographer and outdoorsman and enjoys rebuilding retro-computers including PDP-11s and original Macintosh systems, as well as classical computing platforms and technologies.

SREcon21 Open Access Sponsored by Indeed

BibTeX
@conference {276747,
author = {Dan Shoop},
title = {Improving Observability in Your Observability: Simple Tips for {SREs}},
year = {2021},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = oct
}

Presentation Video