Improving How We Observe Our Observability Data - Techniques for SREs

Explore techniques for improving observability data visualization in this SREcon22 Americas talk. Learn from historical time-series examples and apply lessons to enhance SLO narratives, engineering reports, and incident retrospectives. Discover how to effectively use multi-variate relationships, small multiples, and sparklines while avoiding common pitfalls in engineering presentations. Gain insights from Dan Shoop's 30+ years of experience in building distributed systems and his focus on telemetry and observability as critical components for understanding system health and service impacts.

Intro
What we're going to talk about
Time Series Data Motion of the Planets
Multivariate Time Series Chart Steal Playfair's chart!
Multivariate Observability Visualizations The Minard
Common pitfalls that distract from good observability
Improving Data Density and Observations in Tables Sparklines
Conclusion