The Observability of Everything: Instrumenting Science with DevOps Tools

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.

• 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.