Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Engineering and ITOps teams have an important mission: keeping their software and digital systems performing and reliable. But as we’re about to embrace a new year full of changes, industry shifts, and AI developments, this mission is challenged by increasingly complex environments, technology alternatives, and an overwhelming number of tools available. The result? Overages, tool sprawl, and toil, which all lead to longer times to detect and resolve issues.

As applications in the cloud become more distributed and complex, the Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) for production issues is getting longer. Modern systems are built with hundreds of distinct, ephemeral, and interconnected cloud components, which can make it exceptionally hard for engineers to understand the current state of their applications, what problems are impacting customers, and why those problems are occurring.

Most SREs and IT Ops manage Java applications without source code access or communication with AppDev teams. When applications have performance issues those SREs or IT Ops teams deploying and maintaining the infrastructure often have to prove that it is the application at fault and supply information to the app supplier which provides evidence of the issue.

Cloud-native developers and practitioners gathered from around the world to learn, collaborate, and network at KubeCon/CloudNativeCon North America 2023 between November 6th and 9th at McCormick Place in Chicago, IL—myself included. This wasn’t my first time attending—I’ve been coming to KubeCon since 2016—but it was easily one of the most exciting experiences I’ve had as part of the Cloud Native community.

This is the final article of a three-part series. To start at the beginning, read Part 1: Benefiting from multi-cluster setups requires familiarity with common variations and Part 2: Exploring the facets of a multi-cluster observability strategy. As companies scale software production, they lean on Kubernetes as a crucial container orchestration platform for managing, deploying and ensuring software availability.

ShipHero needed a robust, cost efficient observability platform to support DevOps, customer support, and more. Committed to timely service, ShipHero recognizes that the seamless performance of its software is paramount to customer satisfaction. To maintain this high standard, the development team needs the right data at their fingertips to quickly find and solve problems as they occur.

Imagine this scenario: your platform appears to have an issue. Maybe it has gone down or maybe it has affected a large volume of users or perhaps just a few of those important ones; either way there is a significant problem with it. Users are complaining and are happy to shout about the platform not working on X (formally Twitter).

Now that we’ve had time to decompress from KubeCon, we wanted to do a writeup about our collective experience. Six of us spoke at the conference and Charity participated in a panel, so we included short talk recaps.