Launching Obserfana: A New Chapter in Observability Training

Over the past seven years, I’ve had the pleasure of working with a lot of organizations on their observability stacks. From startups instrumenting their first services to enterprises struggling with overlapping monitoring tools. I’ve helped teams set up Grafana dashboards, diagnose broken alerting pipelines, implement OpenTelemetry, and make sense of what their traces are actually telling them.

And it feels like the right time to keep going with it.

That’s why I’m starting Obserfana, a consultancy focused exclusively on Grafana and observability training.

Why Now

There was no real decisive moment. The more I worked in strategic consulting roles, the more I kept seeing the same kinds of problems. Teams that had the tools but didn’t know how to use them. Engineers who could read a dashboard but couldn’t tell you what the data actually meant. Organizations paying for observability platforms they were using at maybe 20% of their potential.

The tooling has grown enormously. Grafana, OpenTelemetry, the LGTM stack, Pyroscope for continuous profiling. The ecosystem is genuinely impressive right now, sometimes overwhelmingly so. But tooling maturity doesn’t automatically translate into organizational capability. That gap is where things get expensive, and where good training actually makes a difference.

I’ve also been running hands-on workshops at conferences for a while now. Most recently at Test Automation Days in Hilversum, where I ran a session on Grafana Synthetics, K6, and alerting. Those sessions show me how much I enjoy the teaching side of this work, not just the consulting. It gives me energy to watch a room of engineers go from “I’ve never touched this” to “I could actually use this on Monday.”

That’s the feeling I want to build a company around.

What Makes Obserfana Different

The name gives it away. Obserfana is a mashup of observability and Grafana, which is basically my professional world in two words. I’m a Grafana Champion, so it felt wrong to call it anything else.

But the more important word in what I do is “tailor-made.”

Most training in this space is generic by design. A vendor runs a course on their product. A training company sells the same curriculum to every client. You sit through two days of slides and leave with a vague sense that you probably won’t use most of what you just learned.

That’s not how observability actually works in the real world. The problems a fintech team faces with their Grafana setup are different from the problems a SaaS platform team faces. The person who needs to understand distributed tracing is not the same person who needs to understand how to build effective alerting rules. The team migrating off Datadog has completely different needs from the team starting from scratch with Prometheus and Loki.

Obserfana is built on that. Before I run any training, I want to understand what your team actually needs. What signals do you work with? Where are the knowledge gaps? What does your current stack look like? What’s costing you the most time and energy right now? What’s the problem, and what does it mean for you if we solve it together?

From there I build something that fits. Whether that’s a deep dive on traces and Tempo, a practical introduction to the four signals, a session on effective dashboarding and alerting, or a multi-day program that covers the full stack. I can cover metrics, logs, traces and profiles, and how they work together in a production environment.

What I Offer

I offer training and workshops for engineering teams on the following observability topics:

• The four observability signals: metrics, logs, traces and profiles
• Grafana and the LGTM stack (Loki, Grafana, Tempo, Mimir)
• OpenTelemetry instrumentation and pipeline design
• Alerting strategy and reducing alert fatigue
• Synthetic monitoring with K6 and Grafana Synthetics
• Dashboard design and making dashboards actually useful
• Observability platform consolidation and strategy

Everything is designed around your team, your stack, and your problems.

Let’s Talk

If you’re leading a platform team, running a DevOps or SRE practice, or just trying to get more value out of the observability tooling you’re already paying for, I’d love to have a conversation.

You can reach me at info@obserfana.com or find me on LinkedIn.

Observability should reduce toil, not add to it. That’s what Obserfana is here to help with.