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jkowall/README.md

πŸ‘‹ Hi, I'm Jonah Kowall

πŸš€ Observability Expert | Open Source Advocate | Technology Leader

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πŸ’Ό About Me

I'm a technology leader passionate about observability, distributed systems, and open source. Currently working at Paessler in Pompano Beach, FL, I focus on building scalable monitoring and observability solutions that help organizations understand their complex systems.

🎯 Expertise

  • πŸ”­ Observability & Monitoring: Distributed tracing, metrics, and logging
  • 🌐 Distributed Systems: Microservices architecture and cloud-native technologies
  • πŸ“Š Search & Analytics: Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, and data platforms
  • πŸ› οΈ Open Source: Active contributor and maintainer in CNCF projects
  • 🎀 Thought Leadership: Speaking, writing, and industry analysis as a former analyst
  • πŸ“ˆ Leadership: Building and running development, product, UX, design, and production operations teams (100+ people) with a focus on openness, transparency, and collaborative discussion. Strong advocate for the player/coach approach where managers contribute directly to technical work.
  • πŸ‘₯ People Development: Mentoring and building people towards successful careers through servant leadership principles, with a focus on efficiency and leveraging AI to help teams build and iterate faster

🌟 Notable Projects

Jaeger - CNCF Distributed Tracing Platform

Stars | Open source, end-to-end distributed tracing platform

Active maintainer and contributor helping organizations implement distributed tracing and observability at scale for microservices-based distributed systems.

Stars | Open source distributed search and analytics engine

Member of the technical steering committee and part of the founding team for this powerful open source search and analytics platform, making advanced search capabilities accessible to everyone.

OpenTelemetry - CNCF Observability Framework

Stars | Vendor-neutral observability framework

Regular community participant and contributor since the project's inception, driving the future of observability standards and tooling.

Stars | Web interface for Jaeger distributed tracing

Building intuitive user experiences for complex observability data.


πŸ› οΈ Tech Stack

Languages:      Go, Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, Python
Platforms:      Kubernetes, Docker, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud
Observability:  Jaeger, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Thanos
Search:         OpenSearch, Elasticsearch
Databases:      PostgreSQL, Cassandra, ClickHouse, Redis
Tools:          Git, CI/CD, Terraform, Helm

πŸ“Š GitHub Stats

Jonah's GitHub Stats

Top Languages


🀝 Let's Connect!

I'm always interested in discussing:

  • πŸ’‘ Observability and monitoring strategies
  • 🌐 Open source collaboration opportunities
  • πŸš€ Cloud-native architectures
  • πŸ“ˆ Technology leadership and team building

Feel free to reach out via Twitter/X, LinkedIn, or email!


πŸ’­ "Making complex systems observable, one trace at a time."

Profile Views

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  1. jaegertracing/jaeger jaegertracing/jaeger Public

    CNCF Jaeger, a Distributed Tracing Platform

    Go 22.5k 2.8k

  2. opensearch-project/OpenSearch opensearch-project/OpenSearch Public

    πŸ”Ž Open source distributed and RESTful search engine.

    Java 12.4k 2.4k

  3. jaegertracing/jaeger-ui jaegertracing/jaeger-ui Public

    Web UI for Jaeger

    JavaScript 1.4k 667

  4. jaegertracing/documentation jaegertracing/documentation Public

    Documentation/website for the Jaeger Distributed Tracing project.

    TypeScript 81 184