Observability in Action: Hands-On with Dynatrace

About this talk

A beginner-friendly, hands-on workshop co-delivered at ZurichJS in Zürich, guiding attendees through the three pillars of observability — metrics, logs, and traces — using a demo application as a real-world playground. The session covered smart alerting with AI-powered anomaly detection, cost-effective data ingestion strategies, and distributed tracing for debugging. All learnings were kept tool-agnostic, with Dynatrace used as the primary platform to bring the concepts to life.

Key takeaways

• Deep understanding of the three pillars of observability and how to correlate them
• Configuring smart, symptom-based alerts that leverage AI anomaly detection to cut noise
• Building cost-effective observability pipelines with strategic sampling and retention
• Using distributed tracing and OpenTelemetry to hunt down latency issues and service dependencies
• How to foster an observability culture within a development team