In the last decade, observability has become a critically important concept that every engineer should be familiar with, but the prospect of building and maintaining an observability stack can be daunting for smaller organizations.

In this talk, I will cover my experiences building observability for NYC Mesh, a non-profit community network dedicated to providing high-speed, reliable internet to all New Yorkers, and apply those experiences to provide direction for how to get started on your own observability journey. I will discuss our network and computing infrastructure, our usage of Grafana, Datadog, and Zabbix, and how the observability solutions we built were influenced by our interest in keeping operational costs low.