Observability & Ops:DevOps for Integration Engineers

​A practitioner day exploring how distributed systems stay alive — golden signals, tracing, automation, and the ops mindset that makes integrations resilient

Integration systems break in subtle ways. A queue fills up silently. A partner API degrades by 200ms. A certificate expires at 2 AM. The engineers who catch these before they become incidents are the ones who've built the right observability practice — and the automation to act on it.

​This is a practitioner-focused day for developers, platform engineers, and technical ops professionals who work with APIs, message brokers, middleware, and distributed systems. We'll go deep on golden signals, distributed tracing, incident automation, and the DevOps culture that keeps integrations running at scale.

​Organized by the Nairobi GitHub Campus Expert community. All skill levels welcome — from engineers building their first CI/CD pipeline to senior platform engineers running production at scale.

​Agenda
9:00

• ​Registration & networking

• ​Grab coffee, meet the community, set up your environment.

• ​Networking

• ​9:30

  • ​Opening: Why integrations fail and how to see it coming

  • ​A framing talk on the state of observability in integration-heavy systems — what most teams get wrong and what world-class ops looks like.

  • ​Keynote

• ​10:15

  • ​Golden signals in practice: Latency, traffic, errors, saturation

  • ​Deep dive into the four golden signals with real examples from API and message queue environments. Prometheus + Grafana live demo.

  • ​Talk

• ​11:15

  • ​Hands-on: Distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry and Jaeger

  • ​Instrument a sample microservice, generate traces, and diagnose a slow integration fault end-to-end. Bring your laptop.

  • ​Workshop

• ​12:30

  • ​Lunch break

  • ​Break

• ​1:30

  • ​Scripting your way out of toil: Automation for integration ops

  • ​From health check scripts to self-healing runbooks — practical Python and Bash patterns for reducing manual operational work.

  • ​Talk

• ​2:15

  • ​Hands-on: Building a partner connectivity validator

  • ​Build a configuration-driven script that checks 10 API endpoints, measures latency against thresholds, and fires a Slack alert on failure.

  • ​Workshop

• ​3:15

  • ​Panel: Ops culture in African tech — what's different, what matters

  • ​Engineers from fintech, telco, and platform teams discuss incident culture, on-call realities, and what DevOps maturity looks like in our context.

  • ​Panel

• ​4:00

  • ​Close & community networking

  • ​Networking