For those of us who love observability and monitoring, there aren’t many places to hang out, chat, and learn.

Many of the product vendors have their own dedicated community groups which are great for working through challenges involving that one product, but not so great when you’re working on observability strategy, org-wide problems, non-technical aspects of observability/monitoring, or trying to decide between new products/tools to implement.

The Monitoring & Observability Slack is an open, vendor-agnostic community for all who are interested in this problem space. Whether you’re brand new to it or a 30+ year veteran, you are welcome and hereby invited.

As we all want this to be a safe and welcoming space, you agree to adhere to the community code of conduct (which you can read below).

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Community Code of Conduct

All participants in the Observability & Monitoring Slack are asked to comply with this code of conduct. Administrators (see below for definition of administrators) will enforce this code throughout all channels and venues.

The Short Version

Be respectful of other people; respectfully ask people to stop if you are bothered; and if you can’t resolve an issue contact the administrators. If you are being a problem, it will be apparent and you may be asked to leave the community.

The Long Version

Respect

The Observability & Monitoring Slack is an intentionally positive community that recognizes and celebrates the creativity and collaboration of independent members and the diversity of skills, talents, experiences, cultures, and opinions that they bring to our community.

The Observability & Monitoring Slack is an inclusive environment, based on treating all individuals respectfully, regardless of gender or gender identity (including transgender status), sexual orientation, age, disability, nationality, ethnicity, religion (or lack thereof), or career path.

We value respectful behavior above individual opinions.

Respectful behavior includes:

  • Be considerate, kind, constructive, and helpful.
  • Avoid demeaning, discriminatory, harassing, hateful, or physically threatening behavior, speech, and imagery.
  • If you’re not sure, ask someone instead of assuming. No, really. Just ask the administrators. We’d rather hear from you than hear about something you said or did after the fact, and we are here to help.
  • Don’t be a bystander. Role model respectful behaviour, but also help to address disrespect when you see it.

Resolve Peacefully

We believe peer to peer discussions, feedback, and corrections can help build a stronger, safer, and more welcoming community.

If you see someone behaving disrespectfully, we urge you to respectfully dissuade them from such behavior. Expect that others in the community wish to help keep the community respectful, and welcome your input in doing so.

If you experience disrespectful behavior toward yourself or anyone else and feel in any way unable or unwilling to respond or resolve it respectfully (for any reason), please immediately bring it to the attention of an administrator. We want to hear from you about anything that you feel is disrespectful, threatening, or just something that could make someone feel distressed in any way. We will listen and work to resolve the matter.

Apologize for Mistakes

Should you catch yourself behaving disrespectfully, or be confronted as such, listen intently, own up to your words and actions, and apologize accordingly. No one is perfect, and even well-intentioned people make mistakes. What matters is how you handle them and that you avoid repeating them in the future.

Consequences

If the administrators determine that a human is behaving disrespectfully, the administrators may take any action they deem appropriate within the community, up to and including expulsion and exclusion from the community.

As administrators, we will seek to resolve conflicts peacefully and in a manner that is positive for the community. We can’t foresee every situation, and thus if in the administrator’s judgment the best thing to do is to ask a disrespectful individual to leave, we will do so.

Administrators

The sole administrator of the Observability & Monitoring Slack as of February 2020 is Jason Dixon. You can reach him in the Slack or through email.

This Code of Conduct is adapted from Rands Leadership Slack and released under the CC0 public domain license.

Community Norms & Guidelines

This is a community for discussion and not for advertising or promoting products – that includes product announcements and other content marketing pieces. That said, many in the community do want to hear what you’re up to, so we have a dedicated channel for it: if you wrote an article or want to let folks know about a product update you’ve made, it goes in #product-announcements. This Slack is a community of people to get to know, not as a place to promote your products. We want to you know you, not necessarily your product.

Examples of things that are okay:

  • You just wrote a new piece of open source software solving some pain you the community has and you want to share the love. This should be things where you have no commercial interest.
  • Meetup and conference announcements for vendor and vendor-neutral stuff are okay, so long as they go in #events

Examples of things that are not okay anywhere except #product-announcements:

  • Asking for feedback on your commercial product.
  • Sharing content you wrote that primarily highlights an aspect of your commercial product.
  • You hit a new milestone for your product and want to share it.

If you’re unsure whether it’s okay to post something, err on the side of the caution and DM an admin.