Seeing the Unseen: Observability for your JavaScript apps

This hands-on workshop welcomes everyone - no prior experience with observability is needed. We'll start from the basics and guide you through the three pillars of observability - metrics, logs, and traces - using the playground application we've built for this purpose. You'll learn practical skills, such as building intelligent alerts, managing costs effectively, and using tracing to debug issues like a professional. We will walk you through everything step-by-step, making complex concepts easy to understand. By the end, you'll have the confidence to implement observability in your own projects using OpenTelemetry.

Structure:
- Introduction to Modern Observability: Understand why observability is critical for modern systems and explore our demo application
- Three Pillars Deep Dive: Master metrics, logs, and traces through theory and hands-on exploration
- Intelligent Alerting Systems: Configure smart alerts and leverage AI-powered anomaly detection
- Distributed Tracing Mastery: Use tracing as a debugging superpower with OpenTelemetry integration
- Best Practices & Wrap-up: Learn from common mistakes, establish observability culture, and plan next steps

Key takeaways:
- Deep understanding of the three pillars of observability and their correlation
- Ability to configure smart alerting that reduces alert fatigue using AI-powered anomaly detection
- Skills to build cost-effective observability pipelines with proper sampling and retention strategies
- Hands-on experience debugging complex issues using distributed tracing
- Knowledge of OpenTelemetry integration for vendor-neutral observability
- Understanding of how to foster an observability culture within development teams
- Practical experience with Dynatrace for real-world observability scenarios

Tool-Agnostic Learning: While this workshop will primarily use Dynatrace as the backend to showcase certain observability practices, most of the learnings will be tool agnostic and applicable to other observability platforms using OpenTelemetry standards.