Where Is My Saga and Other Observability Delights

Modern distributed systems don’t fail loudly; they fail invisibly and quietly. Work spans services, hops across messages, and unfolds over time, making it difficult to answer simple questions like: where are we right now?

In this talk, we’ll explore observability as a design discipline, not just a monitoring concern. Using Saga patterns, both choreography and orchestration, we’ll see how metrics, logs, and traces allow us to reconstruct causality, track long-running business workflows, and surface meaningful system state. We’ll go beyond dashboards to show how observability data can be turned into fitness functions that continuously validate architectural assumptions in production.

  • The Observability Problem We Actually Have
  • Why Distributed Systems Are Hard to See
  • Saga Patterns
  • Choreography vs Orchestration
  • Signals of Observability: Metrics, Logs, Traces
  • Open Telemetry
  • Distributed Tracing
  • Creating Dashboards
  • Observability to Fitness Functions
  • Alerts and Canary Analysis

Daniel Hinojosa

About Daniel Hinojosa

Daniel is a programmer, consultant, instructor, speaker, and recent author. With over 20 years of experience, he does work for private, educational, and government institutions. He is also currently a speaker for No Fluff Just Stuff tour. Daniel loves JVM languages like Java, Groovy, and Scala; but also dabbles with non JVM languages like Haskell, Ruby, Python, LISP, C, C++. He is an avid Pomodoro Technique Practitioner and makes every attempt to learn a new programming language every year. For downtime, he enjoys reading, swimming, Legos, football, and barbecuing.

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