Have you ever wondered what observability really means and how it can be useful, even if you’re just starting out? In this session, we’ll explore the basics of observability through a fun, relatable project: monitoring the health of plants using simple IoT sensors and Grafana dashboards. Using a hands-on example, I’ll share how I teamed up with my 8-year-old daughter to build a soil moisture sensor project. We wired a sensor to an ESP32 board, collected moisture data, sent it to Prometheus, and visualized it using Grafana, a powerful but beginner-friendly tool for creating dashboards. Along the way, I’ll explain key observability concepts like metrics, monitoring, and dashboards, and break down technical jargon with gardening analogies that make it easier to grasp. This session requires no prior experience, just curiosity and a love of learning. By the end, you’ll see how observing your systems (or your plants!) through data can be both empowering and fun, and how Grafana makes it easy to bring data to life visually.
Marie Cruz is a Software Tester with over 10 years of experience and currently works as a Senior Developer Advocate for Grafana Labs. She is also the co-author of Contract Testing in Action, the first book dedicated solely to contract testing, and an international speaker. She has previously worked as an engineering manager responsible for driving continuous testing and quality improvements, and as a principal engineer, she focused on introducing recommended practices for testing and test automation frameworks.
