Observability is supposed to help you tame complexity, but your Observability stack can quickly become just as complex as the systems it's meant to watch. For most teams, the answer is to pay someone else to deal with it. But bills grow, auditors ask awkward questions, and sometimes you just run out of road with your SaaS provider. In those instances, you have to turn to running it yourself.

Drawing on a decade of experience in building, maintaining, and operating self hosted monitoring and Observability stacks, in this talk, I will explain what it actually means to run your own stack, what the tooling landscape is, where it shines, and where the open source world struggles behind the SaaS experience.

Along the way, I'll cover options for all your telemetry types, with concrete recommendations on what to use and what to avoid, and insights on how to tie them together into one coherent debugging canvas, with a look at where the Observability world is going next.