VIScon Workshop: It Works on My Machine… Now Let's Find Out Why It Doesn't on the Server!

This event is only available for VIScon Symposium or Hackathon participants, as well as Helpers! Please sign up for one of these events first!

You're given a broken app, zero instrumentation, and a set of mysterious symptoms. Your job is to figure out what's wrong. In this hands-on workshop, you'll progressively instrument a live application using Grafana's open-source stack, learn to correlate metrics, traces, logs, and profiling, and use AI-assisted debugging to investigate and resolve real issues, the same way engineers do it in production every day.

In this workshop, the broken app is yours to fix. You'll start with nothing, no dashboards, no traces, no idea what the application is actually doing, and work your way to full observability, one instrumentation step at a time. Using Grafana's open-source toolchain, you'll add metrics, then traces, then logs, then profiling, watching each new layer reveal something the previous one couldn't. As signals come online, the problems hiding in the application start to surface. You'll learn to correlate across all four pillars, moving from a spike in a metric, to the trace that explains it, to the log line that confirms it, to the profiling data that shows exactly where the code is spending its time. Woven throughout is an AI-assisted debugging flow, showing how a well-instrumented system and an AI assistant together can compress hours of investigation into minutes.

The session also covers how to build dashboards that actually communicate what matters, not vanity graphs, but views that tell you immediately whether your system is healthy and practical techniques for measuring real user experience, drawing from Google's Core Web Vitals. You'll leave having done the full cycle: instrument, observe, investigate, resolve. Everything you need to bring observability into your own projects from day one.

The VSETH General Privacy Policy applies to this event.

Details and Prerequisites

Workshops may require items VIScon cannot provide (e.g., a Laptop) which you have to bring with you or to set up something (e.g., install software) that would otherwise take up a significant chunk of the workshop. You may also need knowledge in certain fields (e.g., how to program in a specific language). All of this information can be found in the following paragraphs, so you can decide whether you want/can participate in this workshop, or not.

What you have to bring to the workshop:

• A Laptop

What you have to do before the workshop:

• Check out "Grafana"
• Based on our setup, they might have to be able to run containers in their machine and install the ones we provide (will be confirmed later)
• Code editor

Knowledge requirements(/recommendations) for this workshop:

• Basic software engineering and networking knowledge

FAQ

Why can't I sign up for this workshop?

If you signed up for the main event after the early access deadline (8:00pm, 17th of September), you can sign up from the 20st of September. But don't worry, we will send you a reminder when the sign up opens. Early access is our way to thank early supporters!