From Chaos to Clarity - Debugging Microservices with Open Source Observability

Learn to debug microservices effectively using open source observability tools in this demo-driven conference talk from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. Discover how to move beyond traditional debugging methods that fail when requests span dozens of services in production environments where you cannot pause systems for inspection. Follow along as the speakers demonstrate real-world failure scenarios and showcase practical solutions using modern observability tools including basic logging techniques, Linkerd for analyzing problematic service interactions, OpenTelemetry for comprehensive end-to-end tracing and failure point identification, and Prometheus for monitoring system health through metrics. Master universally applicable troubleshooting strategies that work across any cloud-native stack, whether you're a platform engineer focused on building reliable infrastructure or a developer managing production incidents. Gain concrete skills to enhance microservices observability and significantly improve the manageability of on-call rotations when dealing with the inevitable failures that occur in distributed systems.