Do you remember that microservice that you wrote and successfully deployed in production a few weeks ago? I am afraid to tell you that it is under performing and occasionally generating faults that are compromising the rest of the system. Could you please join our war room in an hour to help us fix this as quickly as possible?

For most developers this reads like the plot of a horror movie. There is nothing scarier for developers than fixing problems that they have no idea about where to start — because their microservice is just a piece of a larger puzzle composed by different other microservices, databases, and distributed systems. Though observability is the right answer for scenarios like this the reality is that it might not be in place yet to effectively make the difference.

The internet is not running in short supply of resources that explain in detail what this new buzzword called observability is about and why you need it so hard. However, very few explain how to implement it as quickly as possible to be used in troubleshooting scenarios like the aforementioned. This talk will show in 40 minutes how to implement observability from scratch using Elastic APM and how to leverage logs, metrics, and traces to identify problems in microservices.

About Ricardo:

Ricardo is Principal Developer Advocate at Elastic — the company behind the Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash) and Elastic Cloud, where he does community advocacy for North America. With +20 years of experience he specializes in Streaming Data, Big Data, Databases, Analytics, and Cloud. Prior to Elastic he worked for other vendors such as Confluent, Oracle, and Red Hat, as well as several consulting firms. These days Ricardo spend most of his time making developers fall in love with technology.

While not working he loves barbecuing on his backyard with his family and friends, where he gets the chance to talk about anything that is not IT related. He lives in North Carolina, USA with his wife and son. Follow Ricardo on Twitter: @riferrei