{"podcast":{"title":"Elixir Wizards","slug":"elixir-wizards","podcast_index_feed_id":674321,"rss_url":"https://feeds.fireside.fm/smartlogic/rss","website_url":"https://smartlogic.fireside.fm","image_url":"https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-images-2024/podcasts/images/0/03a50f66-dc5e-4da4-ab6e-31895b6d4c9e/cover.jpg?v=3","author":"SmartLogic LLC","episode_count":201,"summary":"Elixir Wizards is an interview-style podcast from SmartLogic featuring conversations with developers, engineers, and industry leaders about the Elixir programming language and the broader software development landscape. Each episode explores how modern systems are built, from distributed architectures and infrastructure to developer workflows, security, and emerging technologies like AI. While rooted in the Elixir ecosystem, the show often branches out to compare approaches across languages, platforms, and disciplines. Whether you’re working in Elixir or just interested in how software is evolving, Elixir Wizards offers practical insights and thoughtful perspectives from the people building today’s systems.","last_synced_at":null,"page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/elixir-wizards"},"episode":{"title":"Telemetry & Observability for Elixir Apps at Cars.com with Zack Kayser & Ethan Gunderson","slug":"telemetry-observability-for-elixir-apps-at-cars-com-with-zack-kayser-ethan-gunderson","published_at":"2024-12-12T11:30:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/elixir-wizards/telemetry-observability-for-elixir-apps-at-cars-com-with-zack-kayser-ethan-gunderson","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/elixir-wizards","url":"https://smartlogic.fireside.fm/s13-e09-observability-telemetry-elixir-cars-commerce","audio_url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/03a50f66-dc5e-4da4-ab6e-31895b6d4c9e/0fd8471e-c80e-4683-8410-e06ece191a31.mp3","summary":"Learn how to implement effective observability in high-traffic Elixir environments using Telemetry and OpenTelemetry. Engineers from Cars.com share practical strategies for managing large-scale system visibility and avoiding deployment-driven traffic spikes.","meta_description":"Discover how to use Elixir Telemetry and OpenTelemetry to diagnose incidents and manage large-scale WebSocket/LiveView traffic at Cars.com.","key_points":["Main idea: Observability should enable developers to ask unplanned questions of a system to diagnose incidents and prevent recurrence","Practical takeaway: Use OpenTelemetry instrumentation libraries to easily add vendor-agnostic tracing and spans to your Elixir applications","Failure mode: Relying on Phoenix LiveView's default auto-recovery during deployments can trigger massive, redundant downstream database or search engine queries","Practical takeaway: Leverage the Elixir Telemetry ecosystem to hook into events from libraries like Oban without needing to modify their internal source code","Trade-off: Balancing high-resolution data collection with the storage costs and performance overhead of high-volume telemetry spans"],"chapters":[{"start_ms":60000,"title":"Introduction to Cars.com Scale","summary":"The guests discuss their experience transitioning from small-scale Elixir apps to managing high-throughput production environments at Cars.com."},{"start_ms":255000,"title":"The High-Stakes Switch","summary":"A look at the technical pressure and challenges of migrating traffic from legacy stacks to new Elixir-based infrastructure."},{"start_ms":440000,"title":"The Value of Contextual Tracing","summary":"Why simple log lines are insufficient for triaging incidents and how tracing allows you to follow a specific user's journey through downstream services."},{"start_ms":635000,"title":"Defining Observability Goals","summary":"Moving beyond simple incident diagnosis to using telemetry for proactive system understanding."},{"start_ms":830000,"title":"Managing Data Volume and Sampling","summary":"The challenges of handling massive amounts of telemetry data and the necessity of sampling strategies to manage costs."},{"start_ms":1010000,"title":"LiveView and WebSocket Challenges","summary":"How Phoenix LiveView socket reconnections during deployments can create significant downstream load on services like Elasticsearch."},{"start_ms":1410000,"title":"Scaling Instrumentation","summary":"Strategies for instrumenting large-scale applications and the importance of using standardized libraries like OpenTelemetry."},{"start_ms":2360000,"title":"The Future of Elixir Telemetry","summary":"How the growing ecosystem of Telemetry-enabled libraries simplifies the burden of building custom observability tools."}],"topics":["Elixir","Telemetry","OpenTelemetry","Observability","Phoenix LiveView","Distributed Tracing","Microservices","System Monitoring"],"duration_seconds":2559,"processing_state":"processed","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/elixir-wizards/episodes/telemetry-observability-for-elixir-apps-at-cars-com-with-zack-kayser-ethan-gunderson/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/elixir-wizards/telemetry-observability-for-elixir-apps-at-cars-com-with-zack-kayser-ethan-gunderson.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}