Do you know what your systems are doing?

We live in a world of increasingly complex software systems. It's not often that we get to work on a simple frontend -> API -> database setup anymore. Instead, we have a massive weave of interdependent systems running on-premises, in the cloud, or even both. Given this complexity, how can we possibly: Know how much load our systems are currently under? Ensure a recent release is not causing instability? Proactively be alerted to bottlenecks and unexpected errors? Map the impact of a bottleneck to customer impact? The world of "observability" seeks to offer us solutions to these problems, but it's not a free lunch, and there's a lot to understand. Join us on a journey through the world of observability, including: What is observability? What are the base "signals" used to observe applications and systems? How can we use those signals to do amazing complex things? There are a lot of vendors who sell observability products, but the great news is, you don't need one! We will focus heavily on principles using OpenTelemetry (https://opentelemetry.io/docs/what-is-opentelemetry/), which provides a vendor/tool-agnostic observability standard. Any examples will be done using free/OSS software, so you won't need to pay someone to build your knowledge.