Many teams invest heavily in observability platforms expecting reliability to improve automatically. Yet incidents still repeat, alerts still get ignored, and ownership remains unclear. This talk focuses on the missing piece - reliability engineering culture. I will highlight why observability fails when treated as a tool instead of a capability (common pitfalls like dashboard-driven thinking, alert fatigue, and lack of connection to customer impact).
Roopam Mahindra - Engineering Lead at ING Roopam helps engineering teams build reliable, observable, and resilient services. With more than nine years of experience at ING across both Belgium and the Netherlands, her journey began as a DevOps engineer before moving into an Engagement lead role. Today, she works closely with teams across the organisation to drive the adoption of modern reliability practices, including SLOs, error budgets, customer-centric monitoring, and observability maturity. Outside of work, Roopam is a proud mother to a toddler who keeps life wonderfully busy. When she's not talking about reliability, dashboards, or customer journeys observability, you'll likely find her spending time with her little one or squeezing in a Pilates session to recharge.
