Fabian Lange

Fabian Lange is an observability veteran with more than two decades in performance engineering and monitoring.

He was Co-Founder and VP of Engineering at Instana, the application performance monitoring company acquired by IBM in 2020. At a time when monitoring was dominated by manual, tedious setup work, Instana pioneered fully automatic instrumentation and discovery for dynamic, cloud-native environments, along with graph-based understanding of distributed systems — Fabian was the mind behind Instana's AutoDiscovery agent, the centerpiece of that approach. Along the way, he filed several patents on automated application performance management, spoke at international conferences (earning JavaOne Rockstar honors), and contributed to industry expert groups, including one whose work led to the launch of OpenTelemetry.

Instana wasn't his first encounter with observability: as a performance consultant at codecentric, he spent years helping dozens of enterprises deploy and get value from monitoring tools like Dynatrace and AppDynamics. A long-time open source contributor — including as a former Symfony core committer — Fabian now serves as Technical Advisor & Special Projects at Dash0.