Last updated: December 12, 2025
Code RED Newsletter #22
Last week I was lucky enough to visit CERN for Kubernetes Community Day Suisse Romande.What a cool place. Great vibe at the conference, and I’m still full with Swiss cheese and chocolate.
Giving a talk in the same place where the World Wide Web was invented adds a certain pressure - suddenly your slides feel very inadequate next to the original papers pinned to the wall. And presenting observability topics just a short walk from the Large Hadron Collider makes you appreciate that debugging distributed systems doesn’t require a 27-kilometer particle accelerator (incidentally, that’s a good description for most serious telemetry ingestion pipelines), even if it feels like it some days.
Which brings us to this issue’s theme.
In focus: Observability Strategy
Observability strategy has become one of those topics everyone knows they need, but few feel confident about. It’s rarely the tools that get in the way - it’s the shifting signals, evolving ownership, and constant pressure to make sense of more data with less effort. The pieces in this issue explore what it means to build an observability strategy that adapts to the system, rather than lagging behind it.
Taking Your Observability Strategy to the Next Level
A thoughtful look at how teams mature their observability approach: mapping signals to user journeys, embracing domain-specific strategies, and recognizing that no single model fits every environment. It’s a practical guide for anyone trying to move beyond dashboards as a checklist item.
How Capital One Cut Tracing Data by 70% With OpenTelemetry
A great example of strategic telemetry reduction done right. Capital One cut trace volume dramatically by shaping spans, tuning tail sampling, and aligning schemas-maintaining insight while reducing cost. A reminder that good observability is often about subtraction, not addition.
Digibee’s migration to Dash0
At KubeCon NA, Julia Furst Morgado interviewed Tiago Bernardinelli about Digibee’s move to Dash0. Their story highlights the return on investment that comes from reducing noisy telemetry, improving signal quality, and gaining operational clarity-with Agent0 beginning to play a supporting role.
From chaos to clarity: How OpenTelemetry unified observability across clouds
A CNCF end-user report detailing how a multi-cloud organization consolidated observability using OpenTelemetry. By standardizing instrumentation and routing all signals through the Collector, they reduced tool sprawl, aligned semantics, and improved MTTR across environments.
Kill the Bill: Our $10,000 Challenge to Cut Your Observability Costs in Half
This challenge shows how much money is hidden in unnecessary telemetry ingestion, vendor lock-in, and proprietary formats. By cleaning up pipelines and adopting open standards, organizations can cut costs without sacrificing clarity.
Choice cuts
A few extra reads worth adding to your rotation this week.
Calling New Contributors - Help Us Improve the OpenTelemetry Onboarding Experience
OpenTelemetry is making contributor onboarding more accessible through clearer starting points, improved guidance, and better pathways into the SIGs. Great news for a fast-growing ecosystem.
Agent0 AI for SREs: 5 Capabilities That Matter
Ayooluwa Isaiah breaks down what truly matters for AI in SRE workflows: transparent reasoning, structured context, guided onboarding, and automation that reduces toil instead of adding abstraction. A solid overview of the philosophy behind Agent0.
This newsletter is taking a break for the holidays, and I’ll also be stepping away for some vacation time. It’s been a packed year of conferences, content, and conversations about the future of observability, so a small reset feels well-timed. We’ll return fresh on January 23rd, 2026, with more stories, experiments, and insights from across the ecosystem.
Before signing off, one more thing: I’ll be speaking at the Amsterdam Cloud Native meet-up on Monday, December 15th, hosted by Dash0. If you’re in the area, stop by - it’s always great to connect in person and keep the community energy going before everyone disappears into holiday mode.
And reflecting on last week at CERN: while physicists needed to invent the Web and build a collider to make sense of their data, all we really need is cleaner telemetry and fewer dashboards. Fair trade.
See you in the new year.
Kasper, out!
Hi, my name is Kasper
I’m Kasper Borg Nissen, Principal Developer Advocate at Dash0. I’m passionate about Observability and bridging the gap toward developers through Platform Engineering. I have previously worked eight years as a platform engineer, I’m a former co-chair of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, and I am genuinely obsessed with all things cloud native and open standards.
