Monitoring and Observability for Developers

Introduction
You’re a developer, curious about how your code behaves in production. Your organization already has some kind of monitoring, and you want to uncover new insights — or you’ve been given the task of setting up observability from scratch. Navigating the observability ecosystem can be overwhelming, with many monitoring tools and multiple ways to instrument your application. You don’t need to learn all of them — just the right one. In this workshop, we explore OpenTelemetry, the standardized and vendor-neutral approach to observability. We go hands-on with instrumenting Java applications and examine metrics, traces, and logs using Grafana. We take an observability tour and learn how to link traces, logs, and metrics, build dashboards, and define custom traces and metrics to improve visibility into your systems.

Workshop Outline

Morning:

• Metrics, Logs and Traces: the 3 pillars of Observability
• Standardization with OpenTelemetry
• Hands-on (1): Auto-Instrumentation with OpenTelemetry, analysing RED (Rate, Error, Duration) metrics. Afternoon:
• Quick Observability tour:
• Linking Traces, Logs and Metrics
• Building meaningful dashboards
• Adding custom metrics and enriching traces
• Continuous Profiling
• Alerts
• Hands-on (2): Implementing custom metrics and traces, setting up custom dashboards in Grafana

Learning Goals

• Understand 3 pillars of observability - Metrics, Logs and Traces - and how to combine them
• Standard way of instrumenting with OpenTelemetry
• You will have a demo for your colleagues when you are back in your company

Target audience
This workshop is suitable for any developer with a Java background who wants to learn more about observability, OpenTelemetry and Grafana. Developers using other programming languages can still benefit, as many concepts are language-agnostic. Prior installation of Java 17+ and Docker can be helpful for hands-on sections.

About the Trainer
Enis Spahi is a software developer and architect working for OpenValue Munich. He has over 15 years of experience in Java and is a certified ISAQB software architect. He also specializes in DevOps, cloud-native infrastructure and observability. He has built monitoring solutions for multiple clients, where he also mentored development teams to understand metrics, logs, and traces, helping them build effective dashboards and alerts. Enis enjoys giving tech talks at community events, and publishing articles.

Note: This training can be given in Dutch or English at one of the OpenValue offices (Utrecht, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Arnhem, Munich, Dusseldorf, Vienna, Zurich) or at your own location. Please contact us to discuss possibilities for a remote training and for training in German.