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Lightning Talk Beginner

The Observability of Everything: Instrumenting Science with DevOps Tools

Approved
Session Description

What if you could understand how the universe works by treating it like a distributed system?

This talk flips DevOps on its head, showing how FOSS observability tools like Grafana, Prometheus, and Loki can be repurposed to study scientific models and natural phenomena. Instead of visualizing container metrics, we visualize cellular automata. Instead of logs from services, we parse log-like data from physics simulations. The tools stay the same but the subject becomes science.

We'll walk through examples where scientific systems are modeled as if they were services, with telemetry emitting from experiments. We'll explore how researchers and educators can use familiar open-source DevOps stacks to analyze and interact with concepts like population dynamics, thermodynamics, or chaos theory.

This session aims to inspire both scientists and engineers to bridge disciplines creatively - using DevOps not just for deployments, but to spark scientific insight.

Key Takeaways

  • Learn how observability tools like Grafana and Prometheus can be used beyond infrastructure monitoring.

  • Understand how scientific models can emit telemetry just like microservices.

  • Get inspired to use DevOps tooling in education, research, or outreach.

  • Discover novel ways to visualize and interact with natural systems using FOSS tools.

  • See science and software not as silos - but as interoperable systems.

References

https://grafana.com/blog/2023/08/04/how-to-create-an-ideal-grafana-dashboard-for-science-and-engineering/
https://grafana.com/blog/2023/01/24/five-eye-catching-grafana-visualizations-used-by-energy-sciences-network-to-monitor-network-data/
https://grafana.com/events/grafanacon/science-fair/
https://logit.io/blog/post/top-grafana-dashboards-and-visualisations/#3-weather-forecast

Session Categories

Knowledge Commons (Open Hardware, Open Science, Open Data etc.)
Technology architecture
Engineering practice - productivity, debugging
Which track are you applying for?
FOSS in Science Devroom

Speakers

Aftab S
DevOps Engineer Abilytics Inc.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/aftab-s/
Aftab S

Aftab is a DevOps Engineer specializing in cloud-native technologies, Observability, and platform reliability. He's also a Grafana Champion and an active contributor to the Grafana ecosystem. With expertise in Cloud, Containerization, and Observability, he builds reliable platforms and contributes to open-source projects. He is also a frequent speaker at tech conferences, and actively shares his insights through talks, workshops, and community meetups.

Reviews

The proposal doesn't contain sufficient details, but it is unique. It's not clear what experience the proposer has applying Observability tools for STEM problems, but naively speaking, it looks like the tools might make sense for data-heavy STEM use cases.

Depending on a mock presentation, the program committee could take a call on whether this could be a full talk or a short lightning talk.

Reviewer #1 Approved