From Dashboard Soup to Observability Lasagna: Building Better Layers

The presentation titled "From Dashboard Soup to Observability Lasagna: Building Better Layers" by Martha Lambert focuses on transforming chaotic observability systems into structured, reliable layers.

Key Points:

• Problem Identification: Dashboard soup is characterized by numerous single-use dashboards created during incidents and quickly forgotten, leading to inefficiencies.
• Observability Strategy: Emphasizes layered observability, transforming the system into a structured "lasagna" consisting of overview dashboards, system dashboards, logs, and traces. This layered approach facilitates seamless navigation through incidents, allowing engineers to pinpoint issues efficiently.
• Importance of Connectivity: Ensures layers are interconnected, providing a clear path for engineers from high-level overviews to detailed debugging information. This is achieved by implementing intuitive links and clear navigation paths between different observability layers.
• Cultural Change: Promotes a culture shift towards making observability an integral part of system reliability. Involves engaging the team through hands-on exercises and drills to foster a sense of ownership and familiarity with the tooling.

The talk provides practical insights into creating a robust observability framework that enhances system reliability and engineer confidence, ultimately allowing teams to manage incidents with greater assurance and efficiency.

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Let's be honest - observability can suck. Ever feel like you're swimming in dashboard soup? You know the feeling: tons of single-use dashboards, building new ones during every incident only to lose them in the chaos, and spending ages creating visualizations that no one ever looks at again. Even with all the right tools, something still feels off.

This talk shares the journey of how our team tackled this exact problem while building an on-call tool with high expectations for reliability. You'll hear how we went from feeling lost in our own tooling to becoming confident enough to sleep soundly while on-call. Through building clear system boundaries, a thoughtful approach to dashboards, and running hands-on drills with our team, our observability approach became the key thing that makes our system feel reliable.

Key takeaways include:

• Principles for building dashboards that are useful, long lived, and widely adopted
• How to layer your stack, by connecting your observability tooling to build a debugging flow that puts UX first
• Creating a culture change towards observability, getting your team invested through hands-on drills