How they finally stopped blaming the gremlins and actually found their queueing bottlenecks

Oli Lane and Julian Wreford from Gearset share their journey from frustrating, unsolved production issues to gaining true observability into their asynchronous systems. After a late-Friday customer complaint about a mysteriously delayed backup job, they realized their traditional dashboards and logs left them shrugging and guessing, never truly answering 'why' something happened.

This presentation details their practical strategies using OpenTelemetry to move from squinting at graphs to pinpointing exact queue bottlenecks. They explain how to measure queue health, turn confusion into confidence for production systems, and share hard-won tips they wish they'd known earlier. The core takeaway is a clear path from reactive guesswork to proactive understanding of distributed system performance.