Alistair McLaurin

SLOs are a powerful tool for aligning engineering teams around reliability goals - but only when they’re grounded in real user experience and business impact. This panel explores how leading organisations are designing meaningful service level objectives, enforcing error budgets, and using them to guide trade-offs between reliability, velocity, and innovation.

• Crafting actionable SLOs that reflect customer experience, not just system metrics.
• Using error budgets to navigate trade-offs between reliability and feature delivery.
• Embedding SLO thinking across product, platform, and business teams.
• Overcoming the cultural and tooling challenges of SLO adoption at scale.
• Assessing how to apply SRE to clouds that are not public.

OpenTelemetry promises a unified, vendor-neutral approach to observability - but adopting it at scale comes with technical and organizational hurdles. In this panel, engineering and observability leaders share lessons learned from rolling out OpenTelemetry in complex environments. We’ll explore what it takes to drive adoption across teams, integrate with legacy systems, and align OpenTelemetry with broader observability strategies.

• Building internal alignment and education around OpenTelemetry adoption.
• Navigating compatibility with existing agents, SDKs, and monitoring tools.
• Managing the transition from proprietary instrumentation to open standards.
• Tuning performance, scalability, and data governance in production environments.
• Measuring success and sustaining momentum post-implementation.

As observability data volumes explode, so do the costs - leaving many organizations struggling to balance visibility with financial sustainability. This panel explores how engineering, platform, and finance leaders are working together to control observability spend without sacrificing critical insights. We’ll discuss strategies for smarter data collection, tooling consolidation, and aligning observability investments with business value.

• Understanding where observability costs originate — and how to make them visible.
• Tuning telemetry pipelines to reduce volume and noise.
• Choosing between high-fidelity data and cost-effective sampling.
• Evaluating ROI across vendors, open-source tools, and internal platforms.
• Fostering a culture of cost-awareness among engineering teams.