It Is More Than Just Correlation - A Debug Journey

The presentation discusses the challenges faced by site reliability engineers when troubleshooting issues in Kubernetes and introduces korrel8, an open source tool that aims to reduce the cognitive load of engineers when attempting to debug issues through the correlation of observability signals.

• Observability signals are crucial for site reliability engineers to troubleshoot issues in Kubernetes
• There is a lack of established open source tools that aggregate all the different observability signals and help users understand how their systems behave
• Korrel8 is an open source project founded within Reddit that aims to make correlation across observability signals accessible to everyone
• Korrel8 can reduce the cognitive load of engineers when attempting to debug issues
• The presentation includes a demo of korrel8 and a sneak peek overview of the roadmap vision and next steps

Site reliability engineers often face challenges when troubleshooting issues in Kubernetes due to the abundance of observability signals and the lack of established open source tools that aggregate and correlate these signals. Korrel8, an open source project founded within Reddit, aims to address this issue by making correlation across observability signals accessible to everyone. With korrel8, engineers can reduce their cognitive load when attempting to debug issues and improve their command line interface experience. The presentation includes a demo of korrel8 and a sneak peek overview of the roadmap vision and next steps.

Workloads running on Kubernetes can break in many different and subtle ways, which are often hard to diagnose. Ideally, we would have many observability signals at our disposal to understand what happens and how to fix it: alerts, metrics, logs, and traces. Besides these traditional observability signals, the Kubernetes API also provides useful information such as resources’ metadata, status, and events. With so many different data sources available, the main challenge is making sense of this firehose of data and correlating the different signals in a meaningful way. The talk will focus on korrel8, a new open source tool, which aims - through the correlation of observability signals - at reducing the cognitive load of engineers when attempting to debug issues.