One Mo' Gin

Creating a Culture of Observability

For a change of pace, I’d like to share a video of me talking, rather than writing something for you!

In June of 2016 I was lucky enough to be selected to speak at Monitorama and I’m proud to post the video here for anyone interested in the work.

Monitorama PDX 2016 - Cory Watson - Creating A Culture of Observability at Stripe from Monitorama on Vimeo.

Here are the slides if you prefer to flip through them rather than listen to me talk.

The gist is pretty simple: When I joined Stripe I began a process of adding Observability to the company culture. You may be wondering what observability even is! Well, in control theory, observability is a measure for how well internal states of a system can be inferred by knowledge of its external outputs.

In other words, if our sensors — think about metrics, logs and traces — are good, then we can learn about how effectively our systems are working!

My job at Stripe is to make this fucking awesome. This talk is all about how my teammates and I approach the problem, what success and failures we’ve had and how you can learn from that!

I hope you enjoy it. Be sure and reach out if you have questions or thoughts!

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