We all know that our systems need to be more observable, but how do you get to valuable insights? Can you really get up and running as fast as vendors let you believe? And what are the places where it is worth spending extra time to get things right? Observability capabilities have been growing rapidly over the last years. Many vendors and tools exist in this field, with offerings varying in customizability and out-of-the-box capabilities. In this talk we'll take a look at what you need to do to get observability going for your platform and applications.

We go beyond the marketing-talk and see what it is like to build up proper observability. To make it concrete we'll do that for a Kubernetes cluster running JVM applications for which we will gather logs, metrics and traces to an Elastic stack. We'll manage all the configuration as Infrastructure-as-code with the CDK for Terraform. Along the way we will share some key ingredients that we discovered that make your observability setup more effective and downright simpler. Expect to discover what you need to do, not just on infrastructure level, but also in application code, and most important: on organizational level, so you can expose everything to the people that need it most in a secure way.