Monitorama PDX 2023 - A decade of monitoring

Joseph Ruscio's session from Monitorama PDX 2023.
In the 10 years since the first Monitorama conference, the practice of Observability (née Monitoring) has gone through several successive evolutions. This talk starts by examining its origins in high performance computing, adoption by the web operations community through shared OSS, the subsequent rise of cloud computing and the multiple generations of commercial vendors it enabled. Each of these iterations came with distinct impacts/trade offs that ultimately led to the next one and we'll analyze these in some detail. We'll talk through a general theory of "innovation cycles", show how it applies to what's happened to-date, and use that as a framework to predict what the next waves might look like.