Making Observability Ownership Practical for Every Developer

Connor Teague, Greenlight
Gabby Luna, Greenligt

Greenlight is a fintech company that empowers parents to raise financially smart kids by teaching them how to responsibly earn, spend, save, invest, and build credit with their money. Recently, observability practices diverged between our SREs and engineers, and they began operating without a common monitoring strategy, leading to a slowdown in feature development. To address this, we built a tool called Crosswalk that makes defining resources like SLOs, monitors, and dashboards as simple as configuring a Typescript class that links these services to each feature. This in-house library empowers our teams to create, manage, and own their own monitors in the same repositories they’re building new services and components.

In this talk, we’ll demonstrate how you can effectively construct your own centralized, cross-team observability solution—and walk you through how we leveraged some industry best practices to craft a tool that all of our developers could own (and that currently supports 130+ microservices in more than 12 operational environments).