At QCon London 2026, Colin Douch discussed building and operating self-hosted monitoring stacks, surveyed the current tooling landscape, and explained how to build a coherent observability setup rather than treating logs, metrics, and traces as separate pillars.
Douch, site reliability engineer at DuckDuckGo, opened the session by challenging the audience:
Do you ever feel the complexity demon creeping up to you? We’ve all developed hacks to try and escape it, but it’s always there. Sometimes you have to confront it, and when you do, you need observability.
Highlighting a common paradox in modern observability, Douch explained that while observability tooling is meant to simplify debugging complex systems, the observability stack itself often becomes…