About

I am Samuel Desseaux, an observability architect. MTTL gathers my notes, methods and recommendations on observability platforms.

Why this site

In my view, when an observability project goes off the rails, the tool is almost always the last suspect. What actually breaks is a bill nobody saw coming, an on-call rotation that no longer sleeps, a platform nobody feels they own, or an executive committee that cannot see what it paid for.

This site starts from there. Technical topics get serious treatment, with complete configurations that I aim to make reproducible in a lab (a configuration not yet run end to end is flagged as such), but each one is also read from the finance, organization and business side. Hence the name: MTTR (mean time to recovery) measures how long it takes to restore service, and you only bring it down once you have cut the time it takes to understand.

Conflicts of interest

I work as an observability trainer and consultant. The courses published here remain free. I declare here any current partnership with a vendor mentioned on this site, and every page that mentions its product says so in a “Conflicts of interest” box at the bottom. As of this page’s last update, there is no current partnership.

Contributing

The labs and course material already published are on the Labs & Trainings forge. To report a mistake, use the “Report an error on this page” link at the bottom of every page or write to contact@meantimetolearn.com. The source code of the site itself is public on that forge, in the labstraining/mttl repository: every page links to its source through the “View the source of this page” link. What comes next is on the roadmap.

License

Text is published under CC BY-SA 4.0, lab configurations and code under Apache 2.0.