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Join Wayne Bell, Director of Engineering at Skyscanner, and Dan Gomez Blanco, Principal Observability Architect at New Relic, as they share Skyscanner's transformative journey in revolutionising observability. In the face of unprecedented challenges, Skyscanner embarked on a mission to build a resilient and intuitive observability platform that empowers engineers and drives business value.
This session will delve into the strategic decisions and cultural shifts that propelled Skyscanner's adoption of OpenTelemetry as a single standard for instrumentation, which allowed them to rely on a unified observability backend for data analysis while minimising vendor lock-in. Understand some of the technical decisions that enabled them to reduce cognitive load, correlate diverse telemetry signals, and optimise data cost and quality.
Beyond the technical implementation, learn about the critical "mindset shift" required for successful platform adoption, including the establishment of "Observability Ambassadors" and the focus on making the "golden path" the path of least resistance for developers. Explore some of the processes that are helping Skyscanner drive adoption of best practices and engineering standards across more than 80 engineering teams.
Gain insights into how Skyscanner evolved its approach from purely technical monitoring to a socio-technical practice, leveraging observability to enhance engineering confidence, drive data-driven decisions, and directly connect system performance to traveller experience and business outcomes through user-centric SLOs. This talk offers a unique perspective, demonstrating how a robust observability platform truly serves engineers, streamlining their work and fostering a culture of continuous improvement.
Speaker
Dan Gomez Blanco
Principal Observability Architect @New Relic | OpenTelemetry Governance Committee | Author of "Practical OpenTelemetry"
Dan is Principal Observability Architect at New Relic, supporting customers in their journey to drive adoption of best practices in observability and operational readiness across their engineering teams. He has worked in the Platform Engineering space for the last 13 years, in organisations such as CERN or Skyscanner, where he ultimately led the re-architecture of its observability platform with a focus on tool consolidation, adoption of open standards like OpenTelemetry, and building a culture of operational excellence. Dan is also a contributor to OpenTelemetry, part of the Governance Committee since 2023, End-User SIG lead, and author of Practical OpenTelemetry: Adopting Open Observability Standards Across Your Organization. In his free time, he relaxes by drumming on any percussion instrument he can get his hands on!
Find Dan Gomez Blanco at:
Speaker
Wayne Bell
Director of Engineering @Skyscanner, Driving Engineering Excellence at Scale | 20+ Years in Tech
With over two decades in tech—including a transformative 10.5 years at Skyscanner—Wayne has been at the forefront of building an innovative engineering culture and platform strategy. As leader of Skyscanner’s Global Production Platform and Developer Experience teams, he drives engineering excellence at scale, enabling 800+ engineers around the world to move faster and build with confidence.
