Logs, Metrics, Traces and Mayhem: An Interactive Observability Adventure... Jay Clifford & Tom Glenn
Jay Clifford, Tom Glenn
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 · Session
In an engaging and unconventional KubeCon EU session, Jay Clifford and Tom Glenn, Developer Advocates at Grafana Labs, took attendees on an "Interactive Observability Adventure." This talk distinguished itself by gamifying the often-complex world of system monitoring and debugging, using a text-based adventure game to illustrate core observability principles. The central theme revolved around the three pillars of observability—**logs**, **metrics**, and **traces**—and how their combined power is indispensable for understanding and troubleshooting modern, distributed systems.
AI review
This KubeCon session by Grafana Labs advocates delivered a highly effective, interactive demonstration of core observability principles. While the underlying technologies (metrics, logs, traces, OTel) are established, the gamified, live-demo approach provided a clear, actionable understanding of how these pillars correlate to debug complex distributed systems. It's a masterclass in practical application and teaching, cutting through marketing fluff with real-world (simulated) problem-solving.