Ep. #49, Incident Commanders with Fred Hebert of Honeycomb

In episode 65 of o11ycast, Jess and Martin speak with Sophie DeBenedetto of GitHub. This talk explores observability at GitHub, the value of tracing, the BEAM ecosystem, the Elixir language, and insights on leveraging observability at scale.

In episode 64 of o11ycast, Jessica Kerr and Martin Thwaites speak with Austin Parker of Honeycomb. This talk explores how observability within an organization provides a shared language between teams to discuss reliability. Other topics examined include numeronyms in the tech space, OpenTelemetry, and Kubernetes.

In episode 63 of o11ycast, Charity and Jess speak with Lukas Fittl of pganalyze about database observability. This talk explores relational database management systems (DBMS), the open source library Sqlcommenter, query plans, and insights on supporting application teams.

In episode 62 of o11ycast, Jessica Kerr and Martin Thwaites speak with Doug Ramirez of Uplight. This conversation covers many aspects of adopting OpenTelemetry including integration concerns, social challenges, building trust, and running it at scale. Listen in to find out why after 35 years of diverse experiences across several industries, Doug’s excited about observability.

In episode 61 of o11ycast, Jessica and Martin speaks with Heidi Waterhouse of Sym. Together they explore the sensations of proprioception and interoception, how they relate to the future of observability, and the ways machine learning could assist in simplifying that future.

In episode 60 of o11ycast, Jess and Martin speak with Todd Gardner of TrackJS and Winston Hearn of Honeycomb. This talk explores customer-centric observability, Request Metrics, Core Web Vitals, and insights on optimizing observability across different browsers.

In episode 59 of o11ycast, Jess and Martin speak with Laura Maguire of Jeli and Nick Travaglini of Honeycomb. They unpack Learning From Incidents (LFI), resilience engineering, process tracing, safety science, key takeaways from the LFI Conference, and the human side of observability.

In episode 58 of o11ycast, Jess and Liz speak with Brenna Moore of Second Dinner. This conversation explores game development and the many ways the industry has evolved, the infrastructure side of gaming, semantic conventions within the code, and career opportunities for developers aspiring to enter the field.

In episode 57 of o11ycast, Jess and Martin speak with Shahar Azulay of Groundcover about monitoring Kubernetes applications, improving the UI experience of observability tools, and utilizing APMs. Shahar shares lessons learned from his storied career in R&D leadership positions, cyber security, machine learning and AI, as well as general advice for developers, SREs, project leaders, and executives.

In episode 55 of o11ycast, Charity and Liz speak with Martin Thwaites, a developer advocate at Honeycomb. They discuss the dev side of observability, exploring topics like logging pipelines, the pain of context switching for developers, the significance of the DevOps movement, best practices for scaling engineering teams, and outside-in test-driven development.

In episode 54 of o11ycast, Liz Fong-Jones and Jessica Kerr speak with Alex Boton of Lightstep. They discuss Alex’s book Cloud Native Observability with OpenTelemetry, OTel documentation and community, vendor lock-in, and the pain of instrumentation.

In episode 53 of o11ycast, Charity Majors and Jessica Kerr speak with Jean Yang of Akita Software about legacy software, API-driven observability, tips for improving team efficiency, and insights on how observability can inform programming languages.

In episode 52 of o11ycast, Charity and Jess speak with Alex Hidalgo of Nobl9. Alex shares his formative experiences advocating for reliability, insights on utilizing error budgets, and the attributes needed to leverage senior-level influence within a socio-technical environment.

In episode 51 of o11ycast, Charity Majors and Jessica Kerr are joined by Henrik Rexed of Dynatrace. This conversation covers a wide array of software and observability topics including trends in performance engineering, insights on minimizing system complexity, the shortcomings of auto-instrumentation, and best practices for avoiding vendor lock-in.

In episode 50 of o11ycast, Charity Majors and Jessica Kerr are joined by Benjamin Wilms of Steadybit. This conversation examines chaos engineering before production, identifying weak spots in your distributed system, and the health of the tech industry at large.

In episode 48 of o11ycast, Charity and Liz chat with Adriana Villela of Tucows. They unpack Adriana's journey into observability, the community resources that lit her path, and her experience driving o11y at Tucows.

In episode 47 of o11ycast, Liz Fong-Jones speaks with Gibbs Cullen of Chronosphere. Together they compare the roles of product managers and developer advocates, and discuss the phases of outcome-based observability.

In episode 46 of o11ycast, Liz and Charity are joined by James Deville of Procore Technologies. James shares the insights he’s gained guiding o11y teams and the difficulties tech-forward teams face in non-tech sectors.

In episode 45 of o11ycast, Charity and Liz are joined by Chris Holmes of Simply Business. Together they unpack OpenTelemetry, the importance of tracing, and the observability adoption process at Simply Business.

In episode 44 of o11ycast, Liz and Charity speak with Vincent Behar of Ubisoft. Together they pull back the curtain on OpenTelemetry, exploring its popularity and standardization, as well as Vincent’s continuous journey to better understand the developer experience.

In episode 43 of o11ycast, Charity and Liz speak with Apostolis (Toli) Apostolidis of Cinch. They discuss Cinch’s move from containers to serverless, lessons learned from Team Topologies, and advice on structuring your org with strategic constraints.

In episode 42 of o11ycast, Charity and Shelby are joined by Dmitry Filimonov of Pyroscope. They discuss continuous profiling practices, use cases, and tools, as well as insights on how data is profiled at Pyroscope and how profiling resolution is measured.

In episode 41 of o11ycast, Charity and Liz speak with Aaron Aldrich of Red Hat. Together they pull back the curtain on organizing conferences, accelerating feedback cycles, multi-tenancy debugging, and getting started with new tools.

In episode 40 of o11ycast, Liz and Charity speak with Nick Herring of CCP Games. They discuss the challenges faced by engineers in the game space, the debugging procedure at CCP, and tactics for adopting large system changes.

In episode 39 of o11ycast, Charity and Liz speak with Jordan Simonovski of Atlassian. They explore the differences between tracing and logging, tactics for measuring reliability, and the journey of the observability team at Atlasssian.

In episode 38 of o11ycast, Charity and Liz speak with Andy Davies of Reaktor. Their conversation covers the importance of instrumentation, the prevalence of structured logging, and the potential risks of modifying database infrastructure.

In episode 37 of o11ycast, Charity and Shelby speak with Garry Shutler of Cronofy. Together they pull back the curtain on building scheduling tools, making observability tools accessible to teams, and keeping deploys boring.

In episode 36 of o11ycast, Charity and Liz speak with Jacob Scott of Stripe about the need for SRE teams, prioritizing customer happiness, and the limitations of distributed tracing tools.

In episode 35 of o11ycast, Charity and Shelby speak with Mark Ferlatte of Truss. They discuss government software system failures and successes including Healthcare.gov and the COVID-19 vaccine rollout.

In episode 34 of o11ycast, Charity and Liz speak with Jaana Dogan of AWS. They discuss Jaana’s career journey, life before observability tools, and reducing system complexity within large organizations.

In episode 33 of o11ycast, Charity and Shelby are joined by Katy Farmer of CircleCI. They discuss learned helplessness, understanding complicated systems through direct experience, and championing devs to fail gracefully.

In episode 32 of o11ycast, Liz and Shelby speak with Gianluca Arbezzano of Equinix Metal. They discuss diversifying the way observability is evangelized, the indicators that an organization has outgrown off-the-shelf tools, and managing hardware.

In episode 31 of o11ycast, Charity Majors and Ellen Chisa of Dark discuss the benefits of making observability tools more accessible, tailoring feedback to individuals, and the many ways software may change in the years to come.

In episode 30 of o11ycast, Charity and Liz speak with Beau Lyddon of Workday about the recent sea change in observability, the shortcomings of metrics, the role of senior engineers, and the responsibilities of corporations.

In episode 29 of o11ycast, Charity and Shelby are joined by Glen Mailer of CircleCI. They discuss testing in production and rethinking socio-technical systems from the ground up.

In episode 28 of o11ycast, Charity and Shelby speak with Austin Parker of Lightstep. They explore topics like rethinking human error, purposeful and intentional training, DevRel expectations, and underrated management tools.

In episode 27 of o11ycast, Liz and Charity are joined by Corey Quinn of The Duckbill Group. They zero in on the point at which a system needs observability, shortening feedback loops for maximum impact, and practicing radical candor.

In episode 26 of o11ycast, Charity and Shelby speak with Parveen Khan of Square Marble Technology. They discuss Parveen’s journey into observability and the insights she’s gained as a test engineer and quality advocate.

In episode 25 of O11ycast, Charity and Shelby speak with Amy Tobey of Blameless. They explore the evolution of the SRE role, incident management, and the pains of rewriting system architecture.

In episode 24 of O11ycast, Charity and Liz speak with Heidi Waterhouse of LaunchDarkly. They discuss feature flags, value stream mapping, and quelling fear-driven development as a developer advocate.

In episode 23 of O11ycast, Charity and Shelby speak with Erwin van der Koogh of Linc. They discuss the startup ecosystem in Australia, release engineering, and the relationship between safety and success.

In episode 22 of O11ycast, Liz and Charity speak with Jimmy Bogard of Headspring. They discuss maintaining balance for on-call engineers, what’s missing in the average engineer’s toolkit, and moving from monoliths to microservices.

In episode 21 of O11ycast, Charity and Liz speak with Jessica Kerr. Together they explore complex learning systems, how to view outages as opportunities, and the power of feedback loops.

In episode 20 of O11ycast, Charity and Shelby speak with Marco Rogers of Mode. They discuss the wall between dev and ops, application analysis, and wrangling vast amounts of data.

In episode 19 of O11ycast, Liz and Charity speak with Shelby Spees of Honeycomb. They discuss Shelby’s diverse engineering background and how the software community has gradually pulled back the curtain on observability.

In episode 18 of O11ycast, Charity and Liz speak with Michael Hood, a senior staff performance engineer at Optimizely. They discuss real user monitoring (RUM), the shortcomings of traditional metrics, and ramping up observability.

In episode 17 of O11ycast, Charity and Liz are joined by Pete Hodgson, an independent software delivery consultant. They discuss the DORA report, closing the CI/CD gap, and leveling up software delivery.

In episode 16 of O11ycast, Charity and Liz are joined by Abby Bangser of MOO. They discuss observability from a testing engineer’s perspective, the key factors that lead a company to spin up a testing team, and the highlights of DeliveryConf 2020.

In episode 15 of O11ycast, Charity and Liz speak with Rachel Myers of Google and Emily Nakashima of Honeycomb. They discuss serverless development, customer-vendor relations, using logs correctly, and better understanding your data model.

In episode 14 of O11ycast, Charity and Liz are joined by Mehdi Daoudi of Catchpoint. They discuss the importance of team players when scaling, as well as the hidden value in measuring the experience of your employees, not just your customers.

In episode 13 of O11ycast, Charity Majors and Liz Fong-Jones talk with Natalie Bennett, Software Engineering Manager at Pivotal. They discuss the difference between collaborative projects and teams, continuous verification, and diagnosing failed deployments.

In episode 12 of O11ycast, Charity Majors and Liz Fong-Jones speak with Rich Archbold of Intercom. They discuss the crucial importance of timely shipping, high-cardinality metrics, and the engineering value of running less software.

In episode 11 of O11ycast, Charity Majors and Liz Fong-Jones speak with Gremlin chaos engineer Ana Medina. They discuss the relevance of breaking things in order to engineer them more efficiently, monitoring vs observability, and chaos engineering at scale.

In episode 10 of O11ycast, Charity Majors and Liz Fong-Jones speak with Bugsnag CEO James Smith. They discuss the seemingly impossible ways an organization can measure technical debt and how they can attempt to reduce it.

In episode 9 of o11ycast, Charity and Rachel sit down with Jez Humble, Co-Founder and CTO of DevOps Research and Assessments (acquired by Google since this session was recorded), to discuss DevOps security and how a team’s culture relates to their success.

In episode 8 of O11ycast, Charity and Rachel are joined by Nylas Co-Founder and CTO Christine Spang to discuss navigating the complex ecosystem of emails and how Nylas has managed to create an API for it.

In episode 7 of O11ycast, Charity is joined by fellow Honeycomb team member Michael Wilde along with Asana’s heads of engineering and tech, Cliff Chang and Phips Peter, to discuss how observability has shaped their organizations.

In episode 6 of O11ycast, Charity and Rachel talk to Google developer advocate Liz Fong-Jones about ways to build systems to be more transparent and explainable.

In episode 5 of O11ycast, Rachel and Charity speak with Anton Chuvakin, Research VP at Gartner for Technical Professionals, about the ways modern companies make, or don’t make, decisions around security.

In episode 4 of O11ycast, Rachel and Charity ask Adam Jacob, co-founder and CTO of Chef, how the culture of DevOps has evolved both for system administrators and the companies they help build.

In episode 3 of O11ycast, Rachel and Charity are joined by Paul Biggar, co-founder and CTO of Dark as well as founder of CircleCI, to discuss how microservices and automation have shaped the developer landscape.

In episode two of O11ycast, Rachel and Charity are joined by Christina Noren, Chief Product Officer for CloudBees, to look at the ways both the development life cycle and the role of the developer have evolved.

In episode one of O11ycast, Merian Ventures‘ Rachel Chalmers and Honeycomb.io‘s Charity Majors dive into a few ways observability can drive fundamental changes in the way we approach software development.