Anyone embedded in the cloud native observability teams in any organization can voice their frustrations at not being taken seriously by their executive decision makers. This leads to way too much on-call stress, frustrations, and eventual burnout. With research showing us DevOps spending over 10 hrs a week on issues in their environments, we could all use quick action by our executives when we find ways to fix our cloud native issues. The trick is to tell the tales we accumulate in such a way as to engage, inspire, and effect change in our organizations. This session provides attendees with ample cloud native bedtime stories, tricks that make your tales land within the executive human mind, and actionable insights to head home with immediate results. Join me for a half hour of power where you are empowered to tell better observability stories for better executive decision outcomes.
Engaging Your Execs - Telling Great Observability Tales Inspiring Action
1. Engaging Your Execs
Telling Great Observability
Tales Inspiring Action
Eric D. Schabell
Director Evangelism
@ericschabell{@fosstodon.org}
19 May 2023
KCD Czech & Slovak
25. chronosphere.io
“It’s remarkable how common this situation is, where
an organization is paying more for their observability
data, than they do for their production infrastructure.”
Key Takeaways - Attendees to this session will be given a small yet powerful set of examples to help them effectively tell their cloud native observability tales to motivate their executives into action. Humans listen to stories (tales) more than they pay attention to pages of charts, dashboards, and data. Learn how to tell your tales, terrifying and educational, with tips and tricks to engage your executives into believing your need for organization’s observability improvements.
Abstract:
Anyone embedded in the cloud native observability teams in any organization can voice their frustrations at not being taken seriously by their executive decision makers. This leads to way too much on-call stress, frustrations, and eventual burnout. With research showing us DevOps spending over 10 hrs a week on issues in their environments, we could all use quick action by our executives when we find ways to fix our cloud native issues. The trick is to tell the tales we accumulate in such a way as to engage, inspire, and effect change in our organizations. This session provides attendees with ample cloud native bedtime stories, tricks that make your tales land within the executive human mind, and actionable insights to head home with immediate results. Join me for a half hour of power where you are empowered to tell better observability stories for better executive decision outcomes.
Our storytelling today is a journey…. It has a start and a finish with 3 things you’ll use to understand better building and delivery of your stories.
The first starts with framing storytelling as a way to influence, align and motivate people to your way of thinking.
The second discusses some of the physical aspects that you need to know about how your audience perceives your message, how they view your images and how they absorb your information.
Finally, you’ll be given some examples of how building a story includes your personal experiences and apply them in a few example of storytelling based on 2017 experiences from the presenter. These are the 3 things needed to understand when building and delivering stories.
What’s this all about, telling a story? Let’s start by looking at what the basic elements are of storytelling before we look at how to apply them to your individual needs.
It’s not about entertainment… it’s not acting… it’s not a talent...it’s not unstructured…. it’s not magic…. and it’s not hard… the power of storytelling is about having a conversation instead of giving a performance. If you it into a conversation then you have won half the battle. Try engaging the audience, avoid lectern and stand at front edge of the stage, move around to engage all of the audience and make it personal. Questions being asked? Walk over to the person asking, engage and repeat for audience. Just a few of the things you can do to make it a conversation and get the audience involved and engaged.
Each telling of a story is unique, just as the audience is unique
Think, work and rework the story all the time
The telling gets better after 10 and 20 and 50 times
Improvise when needed…. Dropping story script completely if needed
Knowing story well allows for jumping and skipping as needed
Spontaneity and economy can be elegant and powerful
Contract between speaker and audience
You devote time and attention
My responsibility to invest time and effort proportional to total hours committed
100 attendees x 45 mins = 4500 mins = 75 hours
Do I spend 3 hours in prep?
Great tellers prepare obsessively
Understand what audience knows about, cares about and wants to hear
Keep them curious and interested and engaged in the journey
The physiology of storytelling is crucial for your understanding of the most effective ways to reach your audience. Whether it’s a one-to-one or one-to-many session, you can make simple adjustments to your current way of interacting with your audiences to make the most of your stories.
Cognitive research shows humans focus at best for 5 mins, so:
5 mins to reach audience
Best compliment: “I didn’t touch my phone once”
Remember this slide…..
…..used to ensure in first 5 mins I have the info in your cognitive channels.
…..used to ensure in first 5 mins I have the info in your cognitive channels.
…..used to ensure in first 5 mins I have the info in your cognitive channels.
The human mind works on the photographic principle of thirds. By dividing up any image into the above grid, where the lines cross is where the human cognitive recognition will focus, so make sure your important imprintable elements of your slides and images are aligning that way. For western civilization, work from top left to bottom right is a simple and effective manner of transporting visual images.
The house and person in this image are presented in the crossroads using the principle of thirds. Notice for western societies, reading the slide top left to bottom right is comforting for your brain.
While this slide is more comfortable for brains in cultures that read in the opposite direction…. Learn your audiences and adapt your content accordingly.
Let’s look back at the slides we used, are we remaining true to our teachings? Did we position the images and text to reflect the cognitive minds of our audience? The images and text fit to the 4 points that draw our attention to what is being said.
In summary:
Photography and location on slides
Visual over words
Slides should almost be useless without storyteller
Let’s look back at the slides we used, are we remaining true to our teachings? Did we position the images and text to reflect the cognitive minds of our audience? The images and text fit to the 4 points that draw our attention to what is being said.
In summary:
Photography and location on slides
Visual over words
Slides should almost be useless without storyteller
Let’s look back at the slides we used, are we remaining true to our teachings? Did we position the images and text to reflect the cognitive minds of our audience? The images and text fit to the 4 points that draw our attention to what is being said.
In summary:
Photography and location on slides
Visual over words
Slides should almost be useless without storyteller
Let’s look back at the slides we used, are we remaining true to our teachings? Did we position the images and text to reflect the cognitive minds of our audience? The images and text fit to the 4 points that draw our attention to what is being said.
In summary:
Photography and location on slides
Visual over words
Slides should almost be useless without storyteller
Practice is what you need to get better at this… but not just tech presentations, try something new and watch others present at a Petcha Kutcha event (http://www.pechakucha.org). 20 sec x 20 slides = 6:40 full automated slides.
Telling your story…. How you can apply what you learned here to your daily messaging, selling, and other influential moments.
And for what purpose? If these organizations could draw a straight line from more data to better outcomes — higher levels of availability, happier customers, faster remediation, more revenue — this tradeoff might make sense. But in many cases, this isn’t true. “Paying more for logging/metrics/tracing doesn’t equate to a positive user experience. Consider how much data can be generated and shipped. $$$. You still need good people to turn data into action.”
It’s remarkable how common this situation is, where an organization is paying more for their observability data (typically metrics, logs, traces, and sometimes events), than they do for their production infrastructure. -- The Growth of Observability Data is out of Control
Example of data volumes… shocking.
(Source: The Hidden Cost of Data ObservabilityZ)
How do you survive cloud native complexity? With great observability, according to a 2023 Cloud Native Observability Report. This observability report is based on a survey of 500 engineers and software developers who weighed in on ways cloud native complexity makes their jobs harder and the hours longer. With observability, the report concludes, businesses can quickly mitigate incidents, teams innovate faster, and engineering time ROI improves. When done right, observability helps improve both the top and bottom lines.
96% spend most of their time resolving low-level issues
88% reporting that amount of time negatively impacts them and their careers because so much time is spent troubleshooting IT issues.
33% said those issues disrupted their personal life
39% admitting they are frequently stressed out
22% said they want to quit
40% frequently get alerts from their observability solution without enough context to triage the incident
59% said half of the incident alerts they receive from their current observability solution aren’t actually helpful or usable
49% struggle with inconsistent performance using their current approach to observability
45% said their current observability solution requires a lot of manual time and labor
42% of those using a vendor solution said they experienced high-severity incidents quarterly or more versus 61% relying on a platform they built
Among organizations not using a vendor solution, the majority said they would consider doing so to enhance team productivity (61%) or improve reliability (54%).
https://go.chronosphere.io/2023-observability-report.html
How do you survive cloud native complexity? With great observability, according to a 2023 Cloud Native Observability Report. This observability report is based on a survey of 500 engineers and software developers who weighed in on ways cloud native complexity makes their jobs harder and the hours longer. With observability, the report concludes, businesses can quickly mitigate incidents, teams innovate faster, and engineering time ROI improves. When done right, observability helps improve both the top and bottom lines.
96% spend most of their time resolving low-level issues
88% reporting that amount of time negatively impacts them and their careers because so much time is spent troubleshooting IT issues.
33% said those issues disrupted their personal life
39% admitting they are frequently stressed out
22% said they want to quit
40% frequently get alerts from their observability solution without enough context to triage the incident
59% said half of the incident alerts they receive from their current observability solution aren’t actually helpful or usable
49% struggle with inconsistent performance using their current approach to observability
45% said their current observability solution requires a lot of manual time and labor
42% of those using a vendor solution said they experienced high-severity incidents quarterly or more versus 61% relying on a platform they built
Among organizations not using a vendor solution, the majority said they would consider doing so to enhance team productivity (61%) or improve reliability (54%).
https://go.chronosphere.io/2023-observability-report.html
How do you survive cloud native complexity? With great observability, according to a 2023 Cloud Native Observability Report. This observability report is based on a survey of 500 engineers and software developers who weighed in on ways cloud native complexity makes their jobs harder and the hours longer. With observability, the report concludes, businesses can quickly mitigate incidents, teams innovate faster, and engineering time ROI improves. When done right, observability helps improve both the top and bottom lines.
96% spend most of their time resolving low-level issues
88% reporting that amount of time negatively impacts them and their careers because so much time is spent troubleshooting IT issues.
33% said those issues disrupted their personal life
39% admitting they are frequently stressed out
22% said they want to quit
40% frequently get alerts from their observability solution without enough context to triage the incident
59% said half of the incident alerts they receive from their current observability solution aren’t actually helpful or usable
49% struggle with inconsistent performance using their current approach to observability
45% said their current observability solution requires a lot of manual time and labor
42% of those using a vendor solution said they experienced high-severity incidents quarterly or more versus 61% relying on a platform they built
Among organizations not using a vendor solution, the majority said they would consider doing so to enhance team productivity (61%) or improve reliability (54%).
https://go.chronosphere.io/2023-observability-report.html
How do you survive cloud native complexity? With great observability, according to a 2023 Cloud Native Observability Report. This observability report is based on a survey of 500 engineers and software developers who weighed in on ways cloud native complexity makes their jobs harder and the hours longer. With observability, the report concludes, businesses can quickly mitigate incidents, teams innovate faster, and engineering time ROI improves. When done right, observability helps improve both the top and bottom lines.
96% spend most of their time resolving low-level issues
88% reporting that amount of time negatively impacts them and their careers because so much time is spent troubleshooting IT issues.
33% said those issues disrupted their personal life
39% admitting they are frequently stressed out
22% said they want to quit
40% frequently get alerts from their observability solution without enough context to triage the incident
59% said half of the incident alerts they receive from their current observability solution aren’t actually helpful or usable
49% struggle with inconsistent performance using their current approach to observability
45% said their current observability solution requires a lot of manual time and labor
42% of those using a vendor solution said they experienced high-severity incidents quarterly or more versus 61% relying on a platform they built
Among organizations not using a vendor solution, the majority said they would consider doing so to enhance team productivity (61%) or improve reliability (54%).
https://go.chronosphere.io/2023-observability-report.html
How do you survive cloud native complexity? With great observability, according to a 2023 Cloud Native Observability Report. This observability report is based on a survey of 500 engineers and software developers who weighed in on ways cloud native complexity makes their jobs harder and the hours longer. With observability, the report concludes, businesses can quickly mitigate incidents, teams innovate faster, and engineering time ROI improves. When done right, observability helps improve both the top and bottom lines.
96% spend most of their time resolving low-level issues
88% reporting that amount of time negatively impacts them and their careers because so much time is spent troubleshooting IT issues.
33% said those issues disrupted their personal life
39% admitting they are frequently stressed out
22% said they want to quit
40% frequently get alerts from their observability solution without enough context to triage the incident
59% said half of the incident alerts they receive from their current observability solution aren’t actually helpful or usable
49% struggle with inconsistent performance using their current approach to observability
45% said their current observability solution requires a lot of manual time and labor
42% of those using a vendor solution said they experienced high-severity incidents quarterly or more versus 61% relying on a platform they built
Among organizations not using a vendor solution, the majority said they would consider doing so to enhance team productivity (61%) or improve reliability (54%).
https://go.chronosphere.io/2023-observability-report.html
How do you survive cloud native complexity? With great observability, according to a 2023 Cloud Native Observability Report. This observability report is based on a survey of 500 engineers and software developers who weighed in on ways cloud native complexity makes their jobs harder and the hours longer. With observability, the report concludes, businesses can quickly mitigate incidents, teams innovate faster, and engineering time ROI improves. When done right, observability helps improve both the top and bottom lines.
96% spend most of their time resolving low-level issues
88% reporting that amount of time negatively impacts them and their careers because so much time is spent troubleshooting IT issues.
33% said those issues disrupted their personal life
39% admitting they are frequently stressed out
22% said they want to quit
40% frequently get alerts from their observability solution without enough context to triage the incident
59% said half of the incident alerts they receive from their current observability solution aren’t actually helpful or usable
49% struggle with inconsistent performance using their current approach to observability
45% said their current observability solution requires a lot of manual time and labor
42% of those using a vendor solution said they experienced high-severity incidents quarterly or more versus 61% relying on a platform they built
Among organizations not using a vendor solution, the majority said they would consider doing so to enhance team productivity (61%) or improve reliability (54%).
https://go.chronosphere.io/2023-observability-report.html
Data flood is reality of o11y at scale…. drowning.
Remember this slide….. Used to ensure in first 5 mins I have the info in your cognitive channels and shown 3 times to ensure it’s embedded and you’ll not forget what the highlights of this session are!
References to help you on your journey!
Key Takeaways - Attendees to this session will be given a small yet powerful set of examples to help them effectively tell their cloud native observability tales to motivate their executives into action. Humans listen to stories (tales) more than they pay attention to pages of charts, dashboards, and data. Learn how to tell your tales, terrifying and educational, with tips and tricks to engage your executives into believing your need for organization’s observability improvements.
Abstract:
Anyone embedded in the cloud native observability teams in any organization can voice their frustrations at not being taken seriously by their executive decision makers. This leads to way too much on-call stress, frustrations, and eventual burnout. With research showing us DevOps spending over 10 hrs a week on issues in their environments, we could all use quick action by our executives when we find ways to fix our cloud native issues. The trick is to tell the tales we accumulate in such a way as to engage, inspire, and effect change in our organizations. This session provides attendees with ample cloud native bedtime stories, tricks that make your tales land within the executive human mind, and actionable insights to head home with immediate results. Join me for a half hour of power where you are empowered to tell better observability stories for better executive decision outcomes.