If you've ever been to Canary Wharf, you know it's less of a business district and more of a high-stakes escape room designed by someone who really...
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Great write-up! The urban canyon effect is real Canary Wharf is basically a GPS black hole. Next time use the indoor maps in the Crossrail Place app, they actually work underground.
The sessions you covered are gold. The decoupled observability point from Peter Marshall is crucial we've been fighting tightly coupled telemetry pipelines at work and it's a nightmare. Also, Birol's point about AI agents fixing incidents without paging anyone? That's the dream. 😅
Quick question: any demos from the Tracer Cloud agent at the event? Curious how it handles multi cloud scenarios.
With the Tracer Cloud agent, I only just forked the repo today when I got home from the event, will play around with it a bit to see how efficient it is. But from the debrief I got from one of the founders he did mention that its an AI agent that investigates data pipeline incidents automatically.... it pulls in logs, metrics, traces, and configs from tools like Airflow, Kafka, Grafana, and Datadog, then generates a root cause report. I think the entire concept is a smart on-call engineer that does the detective work for you. With how it handles multiple cloud scenarios, I am not so sure since I personally haven't tried it. But as time goes on i would give a feedback on that Harsh
Thank you for the kind words :)
I hope we can set you up soon to have a real world demo so can you can personally try it as well.
One small clarification: we started in data pipelines, and Tracer is indeed very strong there, but we have already expanded to a much broader set of use cases, including Kubernetes and web applications.
Have replied in a separate comment on the multi cloud question.
Nice one! Glad you were able to get back to Harsh :)
Hi Harsh, Vincent here, co-founder of Tracer.
Thanks for the great question!
Multi-cloud is generally not a problem for Tracer when the data comes through platforms like Grafana or Datadog, since they already aggregate across cloud environments.
For teams that prefer not to send all logs or telemetry to an observability vendor, whether for cost, privacy, or self-hosting reasons, Tracer also supports direct cloud integrations. Right now that is AWS, and we plan to add more cloud-provider connectors over the coming weeks and months.
What cloud providers are you using?
The urban canyon effect broke your GPS, but it also broke your assumption that directions are reliable. That's the SRE lesson wrapped in a metaphor: you don't know your system's failure modes until the signal drops. The lost 30 minutes taught you more about Canary Wharf than a map ever could.
I honestly knew nothing about the urban canyon till today, it is quite interesting as to how that can affect gps. And I definitely will not depend a 100% on directions from today😂. Tbh in situations like this I think a physical map would be more helpful
Nice post! Took me a while to realise that the words in brackets are probably organizations they work for.
Matt Henderson (Phoebe) first thought was, maybe Matt showed up with another person called Phoebe.
Haha no it’s the name of their cloud services😂😂really strange names
Great post! I have really been enjoying your posts these last weeks Maame.
The day I realized I accumulated too much swag from events and my previous company was the day I had to move flats haha
Thank you Julien! Really glad you like it. I do agree with the swag being too much . I have way too many stickers for both of my laptops that i'd have to put the rest on my forehead at this rate😂
WOW, really interesting mention on the urban canyon effects, never heard on it. It's still astonishing how even in rapid developing world of AI, things like GPS are yet so tripping over in places like Canary Wharf, which as I checked it's in centre of London.
Anyways, I'm really glad to see you developing, Maame. Keep my fingers crossed for your success, wait for another articles.
Exactly Luftie! It is quite interesting how we learn everyday and there's so many interesting theories behind stuff. Thanks for the support Luftie and yeah fingers crossed! lets see where tech would lead us :)
The "urban canyon effect" messing with GPS is a perfect metaphor for SRE — infrastructure that looks fine from outside but has hidden signal loss. Curious if the decoupled observability talk addressed how to detect those silent signal gaps before they become outages.
They didn’t address that from what I remember Klement
Hi Maame, thank you so much for joining our open-source community and for opening the first few issues. We really appreciate it!
Also, thank you for the great write-up. You captured the event and the ideas behind it really well.
Great to have you with us and look forward to catching up soon 💪
Awesome Vincenthus! You would be the best person to answer the questions :)
Love how you turned getting lost into a great observation about the future of SRE. The shift toward AI-assisted incident response is real — I've seen teams go from "alert fatigue" to actually meaningful pages by layering smarter routing and context-aware suppression. The "you can't automate what you don't understand" point is especially important. A lot of teams are jumping to AI ops without having solid runbooks first, and it shows. Thanks for writing this up — always appreciate when event writeups capture the hallway conversations, not just the keynotes.