Watch It! Monitoring Lessons from Two Decades in Computing - Markus Krüger - NDC Oslo 2026

This talk was recorded at NDC Oslo in Oslo, Norway. #ndcoslo #ndcconferences #developer #softwaredeveloper Attend the next NDC conference near you: https://ndcconferences.com https://ndcoslo.com/ Subscribe to our YouTube channel and learn every day: / @NDC Follow our Social Media! https://www.facebook.com/ndcconferences https://twitter.com/NDC_Conferences https://www.instagram.com/ndc_conferences/ #devops #architecture Do you know how your application is doing right now? Is it happily churning away, struggling to keep up, or has it been failing for hours or days? In this presentation, I will draw on a broad experience from more than two decades of having applications fall over in production and sometimes even noticing. I will go through metrics, logs, and traces, ways of instrumenting your infrastructure and application to produce those signals, and how to convert them into meaningful and useful dashboards and alerts. I will discuss what to monitor, including the four golden signals, and how to manage your signal-to-noise ratio. We'll go briefly into concepts like Application Performance Management (APM), status pages, synthetic testing, anomaly detection, OpenTelemetry, Real User Monitoring (RUM), and popular tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and the ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash), as well as some of the nuances of monitoring services running in the cloud. We will cover techniques for setting up on-call and ensuring someone will do something useful when the alarm sounds. We will also go into recent developments in using AI to help monitor and diagnose your systems. After attending this presentation, you should have some new ideas for how to watch over your production environments, and how to detect and fix issues before your end users notice or even before they happen at all.