Paige Cruz | SpeakerHub

Personal Details

Bio

Paige Cruz is passionate about cultivating sustainable on-call practices and bringing folks their aha moment with observability.

Currently she's a Developer Advocate at Chronosphere focused on open source observability and tracing. She started as a software engineer at New Relic before switching to Site Reliability Engineering holding the pager for InVision, Lightstep, and Weedmaps.

Off-the-clock you can find her spinning yarn, swooning over alpacas, or watching trash TV on Bravo.

Current position (1)

Developer Advocate

Chronosphere

Degrees (2)

Python Web Development

Hackbright Academy

2016

B.S. Engineering Management (Mechanical)

Gonzaga University

2010 to 2014

Presentations

Presentations (10)

Alert Triage Hour of Power: Cognitive Apprenticeship in Practice

Cognitive apprenticeship is the philosophy that it is more effective to learn in context and real-world situations compared to following a tutorial in a sandboxed environment. In a nutshell it is “learning-through-guided-experience” and shines when teaching problem-solving processes experts use to handle complex tasks like say…investigating an alert by spelunking in production observability and monitoring data. Learn how Alert Triage Hour of Power became a can’t miss meeting of camaraderie and system surprises!

There's No Place Like Production

There's a reason "i test in prod" isn't a cheeky take but a lived reality. And that reason is there is no place like production. Not local dev or staging or other environment. This became clear when I deployed a tiny config change that passed all checks, reviews and pre-production environments that triggered a SEV-1.

Examining each step of the journey from PR to production I uncovered the snafu that had occurred (unsurprisingly it relates to overwriting key blocks on nested YAML files).

I’ll share how difficult it was to reconstruct the chain of events in the system compared to the ideal case of a highly observable system and how to share your own incident learnings since we all test in prod!

Avoiding Alert Bankruptcy and Burnout

The signal to noise ratio can be frustratingly high for on-call alerts and downright mystifying when joining a new company or rotation. If you treat Pagerduty like the boy who cried wolf you’ve certainly mired in monitoring debt. Monitoring debit is tragically common and with investment mitigatable! Just how much of a risk are false positives? The data shows that a high number of false alerts trains workers to assume most alerts will be false. Repetition of the same alerts causes even greater alert fatigue. For clinicians the likelihood of acknowledging an alert dropped 30% for each reminder. Paige will share the nuts and bolts of how to start auditing your own alerts to begin your journey towards an on-call oasis.

Pushing Observability Uphill - The Single “Pain” of Glass

For years tech companies have chased the fabled “single pane of glass” , the one observability tool to understand your system from north to south and east to west. Leafing through promo materials promising instant insights and seamless turnkey integrations you’d think increasing system observability is as easy as assembling a Lego set.

In my experience chasing the “single pane of glass” translates to “pain in the ass”. Survey data supports this revealing the majority of engineers cite tool sprawl as a minor or non-existent problem despite relying on several tools. As alluring as the siren call of “single pane of glass” is, let's be practical and examine how to best observe systems across a myriad of tooling.

From the telemetry buffet of metrics, events, traces and logs learn when to reach for which type and ways to bridge the gaps with links and enhance with context to free yourself from the fool’s errand of a “single pane of glass”.

Power Up with Podman

Curious about containers beyond Docker? There’s a new generation of containers on the scene, Podman! Supporting secure, rootless containers for Kubernetes microservices, it was designed and built with the cloud in mind. Benefitting from the lessons learned out in the open from Docker, this next generation of containers will quickly become a trusted daily driver in your dev workflow.

Covering what you need to know as an end-user from the UI to the backend, sharing a real world use case leveraging Podman for open source observability workshops https://o11y-workshops.gitlab.io. Paige will share how Podman and the adorable seal mascots Caitlín, Maighréad and Róisín have transformed her local development!

3rd Wave Observability: Open or Bust

Today we are caught between the 2nd and 3rd waves of system observability - the proprietary approaches of the past are fading fast in favor of open source instrumentation. Pioneering projects like OpenTelemetry and Prometheus are leading the way providing a path for competitors to cooperate for the benefit of the community. Let's look back at the 3 waves of observability to understand how we got here, the vision for the future and ways you can join us for the journey to liberate telemetry for all!

OpenTelemetry 101: Let’s Instrument!

Great observability begins with great instrumentation! Learn how to adopt OpenTelemetry by instrumenting a sample Python application with spans and metrics. Starting by exploring “out-of-the-box” automatic instrumentation then progressing to manually instrumenting where needed to add metadata. You’ll leave with an understanding of how telemetry travels from your application to the Collector and ready to bring OpenTelemetry to your project.

99.99% of your Traces are Trash

Distributed tracing is still finding its footing in many organizations today, one challenge to overcome is the data volume - keeping 100% of your traces is expensive and unnecessary.

Enter sampling - head vs tail how do you decide?

Let’s review the tradeoffs associated with different types of sampling strategies and how they can be mixed and matched.

Intro to Threat Modeling in the Cloud

Threat modeling is a key part of securing your cloud computing environment and is unique to each organization's people, practices and processes. Without a threat model you could end up going on wild goose chases and miss the forest for the trees. This talk will introduce the concept of threat modeling including how to get started, guiding questions and recap findings from the Argo Project Threat Model from 2021. Attendees will learn how and why to start threat modeling today!

Taming Feral DevOps

Feral DevOps…sounds like an oxymoron right?

DevOps describes a culture and philosophy where developers and operators closely collaborate and communicate for more efficient and effective system operations.

If you have been unofficially on-call 24/7, toiled away in turmoil, managed initiatives across multiple silos sans project manager with a directive to “influence without authority”...surprise you have lived the contradiction that is feral DevOps!

Consequences of letting this fester are: burn out, learned helplessness and missing out on the speed that happens when developers and operators communicate openly. Taming feral DevOps is a journey you can start by gathering feedback on the status quo, iterating on onboarding and training and holistically examining on-call health.Whether you’re an individual contributor, manager or leader you will find ideas to experiment with to “domesticate” DevOps in your organization.

Workshops (1)

OpenTelemetry 101: Let's Instrument!

90 minutes

Past talks (17)

There's No Place Like Production

Learning From Incidents

Denver, CO

February 15, 2023

Taming Feral DevOps

DevOpsDays LA

Pasadena, CA

March 10, 2023