Turning Synthetic Traces into Gold - Monitoring for User Journeys

Learn how to transform synthetic traces into valuable monitoring insights for critical user journeys in this 14-minute conference talk from Conf42 Observability 2025. Discover the scale of monitoring challenges at Salesforce and understand how to define Critical User Journeys (CUJs) that matter most to your business. Explore the fundamentals of distributed tracing and its crucial role in modern observability, then dive deep into distributed tracing semantics and implementation details. Master the techniques for enabling CUJs through synthetic testing approaches and learn how to aggregate traces effectively to extract meaningful insights from your monitoring data. Examine advanced trace segregation techniques that help organize and analyze complex distributed systems, and understand on-demand and instance-based tracing strategies for targeted monitoring. Gain practical knowledge about turning raw synthetic trace data into actionable observability gold that can improve system reliability and user experience monitoring.