Observability in an Asynchronous World

Observability is one of the most essential parts of modern software development! I want you to imagine a scenario. You've designed and built an event-driven system. It's working brilliantly—until one day, at 3 a.m., your pager goes off. Something is broken. You're not sure what it is, and you don't have the tools to quickly diagnose the issue. Messages are flying around between multiple distributed systems, and you have no way to understand who is talking to who or what is causing the outage. This lack of observability is causing downtime and frustration for your users. Now what? How do you get to a place where you can confidently respond to that page? When you can confidently get your users back online and understand what your system is doing at any moment? And that's what you're going to learn about in this talk. You're going to sit in the shoes of an engineer and go on a journey into the world of observability in event-driven systems. From understanding cause and effect in your architecture to practical implementation details and, most importantly, how to let the needs of your users drive your observability strategy.