Your Toolchain is Production: The Case for Observability

Let’s face it: your developer toolchain—everything from your local build to your CI/CD pipelines—is a production system. When it goes down, so does your team’s productivity and your ability to ship software. Yet, we often treat it as an afterthought, ignoring the flaky tests, slow builds, and other bottlenecks that hold us back.

In this talk, we’ll discuss why treating your toolchain as a critical production system is the key to unlocking better software delivery. We’ll explore how to apply observability practices—using logs, metrics, and traces—to diagnose problems, optimize performance, and improve the developer experience. We’ll also touch on how a well-observed toolchain can simplify governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC). We’ll share practical strategies for getting started and show you how a data-driven approach to your toolchain can dramatically increase your team’s efficiency, reliability, and security.