Evolution, Not Revolution: Growing Observability on Top of the Monitoring You Already Have
It’s 2 a.m. Your monitoring is doing exactly what you built it to do: a check has gone red, the alert fired, you know something is wrong. So you start digging, and that’s where it gets slow. Which request? Which dependency? Why this time and not the last thousand? Your checks and dashboards told you that there’s a problem. Answering why is a different job, and it’s the job traces and logs are built for. You’ve spent years building your monitoring, Icinga, Nagios, Checkmk, dashboards, a log pipeline, and it works. Now everyone’s talking about “observability” and OpenTelemetry, and the unspoken question is: do I throw this away and start over?
You don’t. This talk argues the move is evolution, not revolution. The real shift isn’t a new tool that replaces your monitoring, it’s getting the signals you already collect to work as one story instead of three. Most of you already have metrics, checks, and logs. The signal that completes the picture is tracing — the end-to-end view of a request, valuable even in a monolith and it’s easy to add with zero-code auto-instrumentation.
But adding a signal isn’t the point; connecting them is. In a live demo we’ll take a metric spike, a trace, and a log line and watch them come together into a single investigation, linked by shared context, feeding an open-source backend that runs alongside the tools you already operate.
You’ll leave with a concrete, low-risk path to make the monitoring you already trust answer “why,” not just “what.”
Speaker
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Severin NeumannBrontoSeverin Neumann is Head of Community at Bronto and an elected member of the OpenTelemetry Governance Committee, where he helps steer the project’s direction and strengthen the community behind it. He has spent years helping engineering organizations adopt open source and observability, previously at Cisco’s Open Source Program Office and at AppDynamics, where he led the OpenTelemetry strategy and grew a 500-person internal contributor community. He is a co-developer of the OpenTelemetry Certified Associate exam and a regular speaker at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon and other events like the inaugural Grafana & Friends in Nuremberg.