For most of us, "monitoring and observability" falls into two buckets - the stuff that watches our stuff; and the stuff that watches other people's stuff. Whether your work focuses on the former or the latter, it's only a matter of time when you fall into the trap of playing a game of "what just happened?" whack-a-mole. You'd think the answer would be clear (you DO have a monitoring solution for that exact reason, after all!) but often tech practitioners are left with more questions than answers.

Having working with monitoring systems for over 20 years, I've realized there are just a handful of those questions and that, once answered, the monitoring solution improves and actual problems are solve faster as a result.

I call them "The Four Questions,” modeled after the four questions traditionally asked by the youngest person at the table during Passover. But it turns out there are other connections, lessons, and insights that the Passover meal, or Seder, has to offer both DevOps generally, and monitoring/observability specifically.

In this talk, we'll explore the four questions and their answers, and learn how to structure your solutions to answer the questions appropriately. Along the way, we'll consider bits of knowledge gleaned from Torah, Passover, and the wisdom of the sages.