Observability Query Builder: A Four-Year Iteration Focused on User Experience

2025-09-14
Observability Query Builder: A Four-Year Iteration Focused on User Experience

A company iterated three times on their query builder over four years. Initial versions were based on flawed assumptions, leading to usability issues even for senior engineers. V3 and V4 oversimplified, lacking complex boolean expressions and effective log support. Through extensive user support and feedback, they recognized the importance of user experience and released V5. V5's core principle: 'Stop making decisions for users.' It empowers users with more control and a more intuitive interface, featuring powerful capabilities like arbitrary nesting, precedence rules, and cross-data-type queries. V5 received overwhelmingly positive feedback; users even abandoned raw SQL in favor of the builder. Future plans involve incremental updates adding subqueries and joins, continuously enhancing the user experience.

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Development query builder

Observability for GitHub Actions with OpenTelemetry

2025-06-15
Observability for GitHub Actions with OpenTelemetry

This guide demonstrates how to achieve end-to-end observability of your CI/CD pipelines by using OpenTelemetry to monitor GitHub Actions. By configuring the OpenTelemetry Collector's GitHub receiver, you can collect traces and metrics from your workflows, enabling you to identify bottlenecks, debug errors, and analyze dependencies. The guide provides a step-by-step setup, including configuring a GitHub webhook, installing the OpenTelemetry Collector, configuring receivers and processors, and handling authentication. YAML configuration snippets are included. Finally, this data is sent to an observability platform like SigNoz for visualization and analysis.

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Development