On-call incidents don’t fail because teams lack dashboards. They fail because observability systems slow down under real investigative load
As telemetry volumes grow and retention windows expand, SRE teams are being asked to run deeper, broader investigations—often under time pressure—on platforms that were designed for steady-state monitoring, not bursty incident response. Tightly coupled observability stacks bind storage, compute, and query together, forcing teams to overprovision infrastructure, limit retention, or accept degraded performance during incidents.
In this talk, we’ll explore why decoupling observability architectures is becoming essential for SRE teams operating at scale. Using a real incident investigation workflow, we’ll break down how separating data storage, compute, and interaction layers allows teams to keep fast, reliable monitoring while elastically scaling investigations when incidents occur.
Peter Marshall is an award-winning speaker, technology leader, and community builder with 25 years' experience in data architecture and digital transformation. As Director of Developer Relations at Imply, he leads programs that grow and engage global communities through education, support, and events. With experience across startups, enterprises, and the public sector, Peter brings technical expertise and strategic vision to help organizations leverage real-time data and observability technologies. He holds a BA in Theology and Computer Studies from the University of Birmingham
