Publications on svrnm :: Severin Neumann

Before I joined Bronto, two things had to be true

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been in the observability space long enough, through OpenTelemetry, by seeing and doing dozens of vendor pitches and enough “AI-powered” demos to last a lifetime. So I have a clear idea about what a company needs to be successful in this area, and what would actually make me passionate about working for one.

Read the full article on Bronto Blog

Reliability Is Managed In Services, But Felt In Transactions

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Modern reliability practice is excellent at making complex systems operable at the service level, but users experience reliability at the level of end-to-end transactions and flows. This post explores why that gap exists and what it means for how we measure and manage reliability.

Read the full article on Causely Blog

How to Turn Slow Queries into Actionable Reliability Metrics with OpenTelemetry

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Slow SQL queries degrade user experience, cause cascading failures, and turn simple operations into production incidents. Instead of collecting more telemetry for its own sake, this guide shows how to turn OpenTelemetry database spans into span-derived metrics you can actually act on.

Read the full article on Causely Blog

Why a Major AI Incident Is Coming in 2026

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This entry has moved to the videos section.

Alerts Aren’t the Investigation

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

PagerDuty fires: CheckoutAPI burn rate (2m/1h). Grafana shows p99 going from ~120ms to ~900ms. Retries doubled. DB CPU is flat, but checkout pods are throttling and a downstream dependency’s error budget is evaporating.

Read the full article on Causely Blog

Thank You, FluxCD: How it helps us, and how you can use it too!

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The second post in our “thank you” series. FluxCD is what takes “the desired state in git” and makes it true in our clusters, repeatedly. It’s the heartbeat behind our weekly releases.

Read the full article on Causely Blog

When the Hunt Feels Good: Fixing the Incentives in Incident Response

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Every on-call engineer knows the hunt: a late-night incident where you chase down a mysterious failure, clue by clue, until you finally pin down the culprit. There’s real craft in that work: staying calm, forming hypotheses, ruling things out, communicating clearly, and bringing customers back to safety. When it’s over, the afterglow is real: a mix of pride, relief, and the feeling of being useful when it mattered.

And yet, the same incident that becomes a great story is rarely a great night. It costs sleep, weekends, and family plans. Most people don’t love the disruption. They love the moment when a hard problem finally makes sense. The trap is subtle: because the story is vivid and the relief is rewarding, the reactive hunt can end up feeling more visible than the quieter work that would have prevented the incident in the first place.

Drinking the OTel SODA: Send Observability Data Anywhere

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

With community-standard instrumentation and the OTel Collector, your metrics, logs, and traces are no longer trapped in a walled garden. Originally posted to the ClickHouse blog.

Read the full article on ClickHouse Blog

Do You Even Need Kubernetes for Reliable Service Delivery?

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Kubernetes has become the default backbone of cloud native architecture. But does it actually help you ship services more reliably, or is it just more moving parts?

Thank You, Grafana: How Beyla Helped Us, and How You Can Use it Too!

Tue, 07 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

By open-sourcing eBPF-based auto-instrumentation and then donating it as an OpenTelemetry BPF Instrumentation (OBI) project, Grafana didn’t just release code, they lowered the onramp for observability.

Read the full article on Causely Blog

Reflections on APMdigests Observability Series — and Where We Go Next

Wed, 17 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Whether we call it APM or observability is bikeshedding. What really matters is ensuring systems deliver the service levels users expect. That’s where AI comes in.

Read the full article on Causely Blog

Demystifying Automatic Instrumentation: How the Magic Actually Works

Thu, 07 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Most developers use automatic instrumentation without knowing how it actually works. This post breaks down the key techniques behind it—not to build your own, but to understand what’s really happening when things “just work.”

Read the full articles on: Causely Blog, OpenTelemetry Blog

Automate Maintainer Tasks With GitHub Actions

Thu, 17 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Maintenance involves functional checks, servicing, repairing, or replacing necessary devices, equipment, machinery, building infrastructure, and supporting utilities

This definition from Wikipedia aptly describes what we, as maintainers, do. A significant portion of our time is spent on upkeep. While some of this work is enjoyable, many tasks are tedious and exhausting.

To alleviate this, we are exploring ways to automate some of these tasks. One popular option is incorporating GitHub Actions into our repository.

OpenTelemetry.io 2024 review

Tue, 17 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A comprehensive review of the OpenTelemetry.io website in 2024, covering achievements, milestones, and community contributions.

Read the full article on OpenTelemetry Blog

OpenTelemetry website goes multilingual!

Tue, 20 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We are happy to announce that the OpenTelemetry website is available in multiple languages! Localization teams have already started to translate website pages into Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Read the full article on OpenTelemetry Blog

OpenTelemetry in Focus: Wrapping Up a Successful 2023

Wed, 06 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A wrap-up of the successful OpenTelemetry in Focus series for 2023, highlighting key discussions and community engagement throughout the year.

Read the full article on OpenTelemetry Blog

Receive any custom metric with the OpenTelemetry Collector

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

While OpenTelemetry (OTel) is here to help you with troubleshooting and handling the “unknown unknowns”, it is also instrumental for managing route tasks like monitoring system metrics, like disk usage, server availability or SSL certificate expiration dates. This can be achieved by utilizing any one of the 90+ receivers available for the OpenTelemetry Collector, such as the Host Metrics Receiver or the HTTP Check Receiver.

Read the full article on OpenTelemetry Blog

How we used OpenTelemetry to fix a bug in OpenTelemetry

Thu, 22 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

OpenTelemetry is here to help us find the root cause of issues in our software quickly. We recently had an issue that we were able to fix by using one feature of OpenTelemetry to identify the root cause of bug in another feature.

Read the full article on OpenTelemetry Blog

Learn how to instrument NGINX with OpenTelemetry

Mon, 22 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Apache HTTP Server and NGINX are the most popular web servers. It’s most likely that you are using one of them in your application. In a previous blog post, you learned how to use the OpenTelemetry Module for Apache HTTP Server to add observability to Apache HTTP Server. In this blog post, you will learn how you can get observability for NGINX!

Read the full article on OpenTelemetry Blog

A modified parallel F4 algorithm for shared and distributed memory architectures

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

In applications of symbolic computation an often required but complex procedure is the computation of Gröbner bases and hence it is obvious to realize parallel algorithms to compute them. There are parallel flavours of the F4 algorithm using the special structure of the occurring matrices to speed up the reduction. In this paper we start from this and present modifications allowing efficient computations of Gröbner bases on parallel architectures using shared as well as distributed memory. To achieve this we concentrate on one objective: reducing the memory consumption and avoiding communication overhead. We remove unrequired steps of the reduction, split the columns of the matrix in blocks for distribution and review the effectiveness of the SIMPLIFY function. Finally we provide benchmarks with up to 256 distributed threads of an implementation which will be available at https://github.com/svrnm/parallelGBC.

Parallel Reduction of Matrices in Gröbner Bases Computations

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

In this paper we provide an parallelization for the reduction of matrices for Gröbner basis computations advancing the ideas of using the special structure of the reduction matrix. First we decompose the matrix reduction in three steps allowing us to get a high parallelization for the reduction of the bigger part of the polynomials. In detail we do not need an analysis of the matrix to identify pivot columns, since they are obvious by construction and we give a rule set for the order of the reduction steps which optimizes the matrix transformation with respect to the parallelization. Finally we provide benchmarks for an implementation of our algorithm. This implementation is available as open source.

Indizierung und Kompression von Schachendspieldatenbanken

Sat, 28 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

In dieser Arbeit wird ein neues Format für Schachendspieldatenbanken vorgestellt. Bei der Entwicklung wurde das Zusammenspiel der Indizierung und Kompression untersucht und optimiert. Als Kompressionsverfahren wurden Datacomp, GZip, BZip2, LZO und LZMA verwendet und verglichen.

Read the full article on Informatiktage 2009