About

Every time I turn around I hear somebody talking about “cardinality” and how it hampers their ability to understand their applications, or worse, their customers! Everything is always “high cardinality.” I decided that it was time to own the cardinality of Observability. These problems are solvable with decades of text books to back it up. I’d like to help you improve your Observability and Monitoring. I’d want to share the secrets of doing so with a responsible cost and high return on investment.

Who am I? I’m Jack Neely and I’ve been 100% focused on Observability since 2013. I was privileged to join a small team in the early 2000s that had been doing Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) for 10+ years already. They just called it their job back then. Unsurprisingly this included “monitoring” a fleet of thousands of machines with automation, scalability, and reliability.

Afterwards, I joined a consulting firm and worked with small startups to household name brands. My jobs included making sure the Observability systems didn’t crash on Christmas morning as folks unwrapped their new tech gadgets. Somehow, this led to a love affair with Prometheus and a few code contributions as well!

I moved on during COVID to work in cybersecurity as an Observability Architect. I worked across the globe bringing teams together to solve large scale Observability issues and found standards that solved their “high cardinality.” I found the magic of OLAP and SQL to build powerful analytic solutions in house. I began doing conference presentations showing that a solid understanding of math and statistics can, indeed, be applied to SRE practices with great success. Stop guessing, and let’s understand together.

I had a desire to share what continues to facinate me – but share that at scale with reliability! This lead to the founding of Cardinality Cloud, LLC.

Jack Neely