GC - #33 Cloud Native Monitoring and Observability

Show notes

Giant Conversations Episode #33

Topic: Monitoring and Observability

Hosted by:

Tommy Hobin

Monitoring and Observability for Beginners

Start with the basics: NOT what is Monitoring and Observability - why is monitoring and observability important for DevOps? What is an example?

Monitoring and Observability in the News

Observability is evolving: 2025 observability is less about shiny graphs and more about getting answers faster, safely, and at scale.

Grafana 12 release (May 07 2025): Observability as Code, Grafana Alerting improvements, Grafana Drilldown General Availability, and more

Key enhancements:

Git Sync: experimental support to version-control dashboards and folders via Git from within Grafana, including branch and PR workflows
CLI tool (grafanactl): manage, pull, push, validate Grafana resources from the command line
Alerting Improvements: Tool to import Prometheus/Loki alert rules into Grafana-managed alerts, preserving original behavior
Grafana Drilldown (Explore Metrics, Logs & Traces) moved to GA

OpenTelemetry + Grafana Labs roadmap (May 20 2025)

OpenTelemetry pushed stable, turn-key Spring Boot instrumentation and added resource-aware Prometheus export, so labels like k8s.node.name flow straight into Prom dashboards.

Monitoring and Observability at Giant Swarm

Did our first Talk about how we created the Product on "Mastering Observability" Conference!
Topic was Observability Platform @ Scale and which challenges we faced when scaling
Interesting: Most problems when scaling were organizational instead of technical (observability as a product)
ie. one problem: What's actually our product and what's our interface to the customer?
ie. second problem: The Vision of the Observability Platform - where do we want to go with it -> Longterm Roadmap
Now working on the roadmap! What progress?
We worked a lot on our Multi-Tenancy concept based on Grafana Organisations that allows us to onboard a customers marketing team into the observability platform!
We connect GitOps and ClickOps in Grafana - managing a persisted Grafana with GitOps Resources (Dashboards and Orgs) loaded in, so people can create those resources in the way the like best.
Getting AI into the observability platform: directions and reviews!

Next Podcast

AI Event: AI for Infrastructure - How Will AI Change the Life of a Platform Engineer? Giant Swarm CTO, Timo Derstappen will walk us through the event while going over questions from our audience.