Betting on Observability at Simplebet
Adopting Observability can be an organizational challenge. At Simplebet, we introduced OpenTelemetry and o11y successfully, then published a case study on our experience with Lightstep. We will share our experience gaining traction so that you can learn how to introduce o11y at your company.
Simplebet introduced its first products into the market in 2020, which required a shift in organizational thinking around software deployments, operations, scale, etc. As we geared up for our first public launch, we needed to overcome the challenges of scaling a backend to support thousands of concurrent users at the onset. With the experience of team members who work on the Erlang Observability Working Group, we made a case for introducing distributed tracing with Lightstep as a tool to help us scale. After the first team adopted Otel and made use of distributed tracing, we mechanically implemented the same strategy to other teams in our organization. Through this instrumentation, we were able to isolate performance-critical operations, build evidence for long-standing issues, and change the way the team thought about our production system.
This talk will spend time talking about this experience but spend the majority of the time offering practical guidance for how a developer can gain traction with o11y and Otel at their organization.
More about Dave Lucia
Dave is an engineer and technology leader at Simplebet. He’s been an active member in the Elixir community since 2016, and a founding engineer at the publication The Outline.
When not glued to Vim in Emacs, Dave spends his time in New York with his family and two Pomeranians.