A Senior Product Manager's perspective on Portland's premier monitoring conference
The Monitorama Experience: More Than Just Tech TalksThere's something magical about the first sip of artisanal coffee served by a live barista at 8 AM while chatting with fellow observability enthusiasts from around the globe. That's how each day of Monitorama 2024 began for me this June in Portland, Oregon—a perfect blend of caffeine, community, and technical curiosity that set the tone for what would be three incredible days of learning.
As a Senior Product Manager for Microsoft Azure, I found myself surrounded by practitioners and vendors from across the observability landscape. The Gerding Theater at The Armory provided a beautiful historic backdrop for the single-track conference format that has become Monitorama's hallmark.
What makes Monitorama special:
What makes Monitorama particularly valuable is hearing directly from companies operating at unprecedented scale. Their challenges today often become everyone else's challenges tomorrow. This year, three presentations stood out for their depth of insight and practical applications.
Note: All Monitorama 2024 presentations mentioned in this article are available on the official Monitorama YouTube channel. I highly recommend watching the full talks to get all the details and see the impressive visualizations that these companies shared.
eBay: The Reality of Distributed Tracing at Massive Scale\ Vijay Samuel's presentation "Distributed Tracing - All the Warning Signs Were Out There!" offered a refreshingly candid look at eBay's journey implementing distributed tracing across approximately 5,000 microservices and hundreds of databases.
While distributed tracing has long been heralded as an observability silver bullet, Samuel detailed the harsh realities they encountered: unmanageably large trace waterfalls that became difficult to interpret, confidence-eroding issues with mis-instrumented applications, and the challenge of making tracing actually deliver on its promise of reduced time to resolution.
Key takeaways from eBay's presentation:
\ LinkedIn's presentation dove deep into how they've architected their observability platform to support their massive professional network with hundreds of millions of users and complex interconnected services.
What made LinkedIn's approach fascinating was their emphasis on context-preservation across their observability pipeline. Rather than treating metrics, logs, and traces as separate data streams, they've invested heavily in maintaining correlation between these signals to provide their engineers with coherent views of system behavior.
Key takeaways from LinkedIn's presentation:
\ Netflix's presentation stood out not just for technical content but for demonstrating how observability has become central to their engineering culture and competitive advantage.
Rather than focusing solely on tools and techniques, their speaker emphasized how Netflix has woven observability requirements into their entire software development lifecycle. Every new service at Netflix is built with comprehensive instrumentation from day one, with clear ownership of the telemetry quality.
Key takeaways from Netflix's presentation:
These presentations from eBay, LinkedIn, and Netflix are particularly valuable because they operate at scales that push the boundaries of what's possible in observability. Their challenges today are likely to become common challenges for the broader industry tomorrow.
Industry-wide themes from these giants:
After three days immersed in Portland's monitoring community, these were the most valuable insights:
As I boarded my train home, laptop bag filled with stickers and t-shirts from various vendors, I reflected on what makes Monitorama special. It's not just the technical content, though that's excellent. It's not just the Portland setting, though the food, coffee, and atmosphere are wonderful.
What creates the Monitorama experience:
What makes Monitorama magical is the deliberate creation of space for human connection around a shared technical passion. In a world of virtual conferences and remote work, there's immense value in sitting across from another engineer over coffee, sketching architecture diagrams on napkins, and debating the merits of different sampling approaches.
With the announcement that Monitorama is taking a hiatus for the remainder of 2025, these memories feel even more precious. The organizers' decision to take a break and reimagine the event speaks to their commitment to quality over quantity. I'm already eagerly anticipating what the refreshed Monitorama will look like when it returns next year, and I look forward to reconnecting with this amazing community of practitioners who are pushing the boundaries of what's possible in monitoring and observability.
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