Observing and Understanding Behavior in Complex Systems

Complex systems have difficult-to-understand emergent behaviors. When distributed they lack a canonical source of truth. We don't have the technology today to truly understand these systems, but that isn't an excuse for not improving the observability to improve the clarity of what is there. In this talk I will discuss techniques to instrument and observe complex systems.

Theo Schlossnagle is an expert in scalable systems design and telemetry collection and analysis. He has an academic background in distributed systems and founded several companies that build highly scalable Internet-facing software.