Kubecon North America took place in Salt Lake City, Utah, from November 12 to 15, and the SolarWinds team was there to showcase updates to our SolarWinds® Observability dashboards and join in the conversation. Here are five key talking points from the event.
Tool Sprawl Affects EVERYONE
KubeCon attracts developers, engineers, cloud engineers, site reliability engineers, DevOps professionals, and those working with modern architectures and newer applications like Kubernetes, containers, and microservices. But even these progressive, up-to-date companies grapple with headaches caused by multiple observability tools. Part of the issue may stem from the size of the companies, where departments struggle to align on the benefits of a unified offering, or tools may have originated in separate departments, creating disparate toolsets. Throughout the event, we encountered overwhelmingly positive reactions to the single, integrated observability solution offered by SolarWinds.
Observability Still Has Many Definitions
Our conversations at the event reveal that there remain several interpretations of observability. The more traditional understanding is essentially application performance monitoring (APM), which focuses on metrics, traces, and logs associated with custom applications. Some people use the term observability more broadly, and at KubeCon, observability was used in various contexts—Kubernetes observability, container observability, and more. The SolarWinds definition emphasizes the importance of looking at all elements that impact the state of your system, including the network, the application, and the infrastructure. When we say observability, we mean evaluating your system holistically, incorporating all factors that can influence service delivery, whether on-prem or in the cloud.
OpenTelemetry Is a Hot Topic
OpenTelemetry is an open-source framework that helps developers collect and manage telemetry data from their applications, such as logs, metrics, and traces. OpenTelemetry is a trending subject at events like KubeCon because it enhances observability in cloud-native environments, simplifying the monitoring process and helping teams troubleshoot issues more effectively. The community enthusiasm around it showcases the shift towards more collaborative and transparent development practices in modern IT, making telemetry data essential for maintaining efficient and reliable operations. Attendees were impressed with how SolarWinds Observability SaaS integrates a native OpenTelemetry framework perfect for cloud specialists, while retaining the capability to support more traditional environments.
The CNFC Is Pushing IT Forward
KubeCon was organized by the Cloud Native Compute Foundation (CNCF), an organization that promotes the adoption of cloud-native technologies, such as containers, microservices, and orchestration tools—particularly Kubernetes, which it oversees. SolarWinds was delighted to contribute to an initiative supporting such growth in the application environment. The foundation supports projects and community engagement and helps organizations adopt cloud-native practices to innovate and scale efficiently. We can't wait for their next event!
It’s Still a Hybrid World
Even with so much talk of Kubernetes, containers, and microservices, most IT professionals attending KubeCon are still dealing with a hybrid blend of on-premises and cloud-native infrastructure. To learn more about how SolarWinds Observability is designed to provide the same level of comprehensive visibility on-prem, in the cloud, or a mix of both, check out my recent article on the quest for visibility for ITOps and CloudOps teams.
