Off the Beaten Path: Moving Observability Focus from Your Service to Your Customer
summary
Argues for shifting observability from infrastructure metrics to direct customer signals, showing concrete results: enabling W3C Network Error Logging reveals widespread DNS/TCP failures; adding session replays with Microsoft Clarity finds a client script turning ads purple and quantifies impact; sentiment extraction via Stanford CoreNLP turns freeform feedback into metrics. Notes surprising facts — up to half of traffic is bots, many users sit on ~48 kbps links, and 75th-percentile metrics hide most users — and reports these changes led to actionable fixes and better product decisions.
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chapters (18)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:32You're probably Not Alone
- 1:33Observability for the next 45 minutes, in this room
- 3:28Observability Focus - A Shift
- 3:47Focus Doesn't Mean.
- 7:15Hearing or Listening?
- 8:58Network Error logging
- 9:51Performance More Than A Numbers Game
- 11:19How do you debug usability issues?
- 11:54What if you could see what your user saw?
- 16:32The Best
- 17:12A Good Feedback System is ...
- 18:37People Want To Be Cool Too
- 19:26Going Beyond Experimentation
- 20:40Isn't That Dogfood?
- 22:53Customer, Meet Engineer
- 24:00How Does It Help Engineering?
- 26:06Observability: The Collective Path
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