Observability is a hot topic in software engineering, but how do we decouple what’s useful from the hype? This case study will examine how Lightstep engineering adopted new practices and tools, balancing trade-offs between the needs of a product-driven organization, a small–but quickly growing–team, and the demands of our customers. While there’s no single right answer to “how do you implement observability?” we considered the needs of developers and their experiences, as well as the needs of users, to help guide decisions to keep teams aligned and our customers happy.

Join us for this Case Study with Lightstep co founder and chief architect Daniel “Spoons” Spoonhower to learn how Lightstep engineering adopted new practices and tools for observability while balancing trade-offs between the needs of a small but quickly growing product-driven organization and the demands of its customers.

This case study is for you if...

• You’re an engineer or engineering leader that is responsible for software reliability and performance
• You’re looking to take responsibility for larger systems as well as mentor other engineers
• You’ve been responsible for production systems in some way, including being on-call, leading on-call teams, or possibly just responsible for debugging software and understanding software performance

What you will learn—and how to apply it

By the end of this case study the viewer will understand:

• Observability, how it enhances traditional monitoring, and why it matters to running software services today
• How observability complements DevOps practices and cloud-native technologies
• The role of OpenTelemetry and other open source software in observability

And you will be able to:

• Deploy new practices and tools as part of a modern observability practice
• How to motivate the consistent use of tools and standards across their engineering organizations
• How to use SLOs to translate between technical constraints and business needs