#50 Making Better Sense of Observability Data

Reliability Enablers

09-07-2024 • 24 mins

Jack Neely is a DevOps observability architect at Palo Alto Networks and has a few interesting ways of extracting value from o11y data.

We crammed into just under 25 minutes ideas like these 7 takeaways:

* Reasserting the Need to Monitor Four Golden Signals: Focus on latency, traffic, errors, and saturation for effective system monitoring and management.

* Prioritize Customer Health: in Jack’s words, the 5th golden signal. Go beyond traditional metrics to monitor the health of your customers for a more comprehensive view of your system's impact.

* Apply Mathematical Techniques: Incorporate advanced mathematical concepts, like the Nyquist Shannon law and T Digest algorithm, to enhance data accuracy and observability metrics.

* Build Accurate Percentiles: Implement techniques to accurately reproduce percentiles from raw data to ensure reliable performance metrics.

* Manage High Cardinality Data: Develop strategies to handle high cardinality data without overwhelming your resources, ensuring you extract valuable insights.

* Standardize Log Records: Use readily available frameworks to emit standardized log records makes data easier to process and visualize.

* Handle High-Velocity Data Efficiently: Develop methods for collecting and processing high-velocity data without incurring prohibitive costs.

Watch Jack’s Monitorama talk via this link: https://vimeo.com/843996971



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