A sneak preview of FutureStack sessions

If you’re joining us on May 17–19 at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas for FutureStack 2022, you might be pouring over the agenda of talks, hands-on labs, and events to try to decide what your conference schedule could look like. 

To make programming a bit easier, there are three different tracks that you can follow throughout the conference: 

• Operate: Unleash observability in prod. This track will build up your observability knowledge and offers lots of practical tips and tricks so you can start using telemetry data and full-stack monitoring to debug, measure, and improve your entire stack easily. Technical deep dives will show you how to debug Kubernetes environments and discuss new trends in instrumentation (like eBPF). 
• Shift Left: Bring observability into pre-prod. If you’re looking to level up your observability practices, this track might be for you. We’ll discuss new tools like machine learning for observability and New Relic Codestream to build full-lifecycle observability. We’ll dive into cutting-edge use cases around cybersecurity, show how AIOps and MLOps are changing the observability landscape, and how you can use things like in-context logging to solve issues faster. 
• Expand: Scale observability value across teams. Wondering how some of the most successful in the business have mastered observability best practices to improve uptime, reliability, and operational efficiency? You’ll hear from customers, ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies who are using our observability maturity architecture—a complete framework that can help your organization hit the ground running with observability.

You can also mix and match any events in any of the tracks to suit your interests—but be sure to save time to participate in fun events like our FutureHack hackathon and hear from amazing speakers like Woz and Dr. Moogega Cooper. 

Here are just a few sessions you won’t want to miss at FutureStack this year: 

5 key steps to true observability

Get your feet wet or level up your skills with a New Relic senior technical training specialist, Phil Weber. You’ll instrument an e-commerce application, add custom data to correlate performance and business metrics, set up alerts using best practices, and proactively monitor site availability. This session will take place on Tuesday, May 17, and runs the entire day from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM.

Do more with charts and dashboards

Phil Weber will also lead this hands-on session, which you won’t want to miss. Learn about dashboard design strategies, and get started creating powerful charts and queries for visualizing trends, and correlating different data sets. Join this session at 10:00 AM on Thursday, May 19. 

Monitoring Kafka without instrumentation using Pixie

Ryan Cheng, New Relic software engineer, and Anton Rodriguez, New Relic principal software engineer, will discuss the difficulty of monitoring Kafka systems in production and how Pixie can help. Pixie is an open source CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) observability platform that provides network traffic tracing, for protocols like HTTP and Kafka, using eBPF. Pixie can automatically provide important Kafka metrics, such as topic-centric flow graph, consumer-producer latency, and consumer rebalance events, without the need for code modification or redeployment. 

This talk takes place on Thursday, May 19 at 10:00 AM.

Troubleshoot faster with distributed tracing

Troubleshooting distributed systems is a classic needle-in-a-haystack problem, but it doesn’t have to be hard or confusing. Gain proficiency using distributed tracing to troubleshoot latency and errors in more complex and distributed systems with Liam Hurrell, New Relic senior technical training specialist. Don’t miss this opportunity to ask your questions on Wednesday, May 18 at 1:30 PM. 

Check out the entire FutureStack lineup

You’ll also hear from a multitude of speakers coming from outside New Relic, from companies like IBM, Chegg, Lacework, Bell Media, Darkhorse, and so many more. For a full listing and the entire agenda, check out the FutureStack website.