O11y@DATEV – 10% luck, 50% skill and 40% concentrated power of will
summary
DATEV builds a full‑stack observability platform over ~2.5 years using OpenTelemetry for instrumentation and Grafana Cloud as the user-facing back end, giving each DevOps team its own Grafana tenant while sending traces into a centralized tracing datastore. Project results: thousands of apps instrumented, maturity self‑assessments for ~3,000 DevOps/SRE staff, reduced ops overhead by moving from self‑hosted stacks, and ongoing costs managed by Grafana Cloud adaptive retention. OpenTelemetry arrival is credited as the lucky enabler; automation, legal/DSGVO work and relentless persuasion provide the rest.
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chapters (13)
- 0:00Introduction and speaker background
- 3:10What is DATEV and its mission
- 7:26Evolution of IT architectures and challenges
- 10:20Observability vs monitoring explained
- 13:40Lighthouse approach to observability
- 15:25OpenTelemetry as a game changer
- 17:55Choosing Grafana Cloud for observability
- 23:11Changing DevOps mindset and product ownership
- 27:09Managed community and training programs
- 30:25Measuring observability maturity levels
- 34:04Cultural change and mindset shifts
- 36:1910% luck, 50% skill, 40% will
- 39:13Q&A session
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