Ariadne's thread through the labyrinth: Using observability to tame a rogue code base

Description

Every week, seven brave SWEs and seven brave SREs get sacrificed to the Minotaur: the legendary latency leech and the ravenous resource robber lurking somewhere in the labyrinthine depths of your code base. You, Theseus, have been tasked with rescuing your sleep-deprived comrades from their midnight pages. But even a hero as brave as you cannot possibly survive the maze without some help. This workshop will be your Ariadne, providing you with the thread to find your way to the beast—and back.

Isobel Redelmeier uses observability tools to unravel a number of common problems hidden in many code bases out there—maybe even yours. She covers the basics of tracing, metrics, and other observability tools, so you don’t need significant prior knowledge of observability concepts (or Greek mythology). For those with experience, the activities should still help you to better leverage your debugging toolkit.

Let’s conquer the Minotaur and root out your performance problems.