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Talk Intermediate First Talk

Key Observability Takeaways from the SRE handbook that every developer should know

Proposal status is Review Pending
Session Description

In this talk, we will explore the concepts of observability and availability in modern production applications. We'll delve into how meaningful signals—metrics, logs, and traces—can drastically accelerate incident debugging and help teams make proactive, data-driven infrastructure decisions. Attendees will walk away with a practical understanding of building resilient systems by investing in the right observability strategies.

Key Takeaways
  • Understanding Observability & Availability: Gain a clear understanding of what observability and availability mean in the context of production systems, and why they are critical for application reliability.
  • SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs Demystified: Learn how Service Level Indicators, Objectives, and Agreements connect the dots between technical metrics and user experience, and how they drive business-aligned reliability goals.
  • Beyond Metrics & Alerts: Discover why relying solely on metrics and alerts is not enough, and how integrating structured logging, distributed tracing, and effective monitoring practices can significantly reduce mean time to detect (MTTD) and resolve (MTTR) incidents.
  • The “Three Pillars” of Observability: Metrics, logs, and traces—explain how each serves a different purpose, and how they work together for complete system visibility.
  • Tooling Ecosystem: Briefly introduce popular FOSS tools (e.g., Prometheus ).
  • Proactive vs Reactive Monitoring: How observability helps in identifying patterns or anomalies before they turn into full-blown outages.

References

https://sre.google/sre-book/table-of-contents/
https://www.brendangregg.com/usemethod.html
https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus

Session Categories

Engineering practice - productivity, debugging

Speakers

Sankararaman K
Sankararaman K Software Engineer | Nielsen

Sankararaman (Shankar) is a backend engineer and systems reliability enthusiast with deep experience in building and scaling high-availability infrastructure. He specializes in observability, monitoring, and incident response—helping engineering teams move from reactive firefighting to proactive system design. His work focuses on creating robust observability pipelines, crafting actionable SLIs/SLOs, and reducing mean time to recovery in complex, distributed environments.

Having worked on mission-critical systems serving millions of users, Shankar brings a practitioner’s perspective to designing production-ready platforms. He’s passionate about making infrastructure topics more approachable, and regularly shares insights on bridging the gap between raw telemetry and real business impact.