Salesforce’s Tracer platform ingests 300 billion trace spans daily across a federated Elasticsearch deployment, but raw spans are a poor unit of analysis for incident triage. This talk shares how we shifted to trace-level analysis—reconstructing span trees to pinpoint the service responsible for latency, backed by an S3/Parquet caching layer that keeps 84% of queries off Elasticsearch and cuts query times 60-70%.
Thomas J. Varley is a senior engineer specializing in large-scale distributed systems, observability, and high-performance data platforms. With deep expertise in building resilient, cloud-native architectures, he has consistently driven the design and evolution of systems that operate at massive scale while maintaining strong guarantees around reliability, latency, and data integrity. His work spans advanced telemetry pipelines, real-time analytics, and next-generation tracing platforms, with a focus on transforming raw signals into actionable insights. Known for combining rigorous systems thinking with practical execution, Thomas brings a track record of leading complex initiatives, influencing platform strategy, and advancing the state of observability in modern distributed environments.
Seasoned technologist with over 18 years of profound expertise in crafting scalable and resilient distributed systems that handle petabytes of unstructured data daily. Spearheaded the architecture and design of various cloud-native SaaS solutions. His diverse industry exposure encompasses E-commerce, Embedded systems, and Telecom sectors. Sudeep has taken the stage at several international conferences in countries including Japan, the USA, the UK, and India. He is a primary author of various papers featured in IEEE and other international conferences. Sudeep also holds multiple patents in the realms of payments, e-commerce, and distributed systems. Sudeep's technical forte lies in addressing Big data challenges, Monitoring/Telemetry, developing cloud-native platforms and frameworks, client-side programming, and creating scalable server-side backends.
