Welcome to ongoing election coverage by Town Meeting Television. This is one of many forums we are bringing to you in advance of local elections and town meeting on the first Tuesday of March 2nd, or the first Tuesday of March, March 2nd, 2021. Town Meeting TV election forums introduce you to local decision makers and connect you with the issues shaping your community. The topic of our forum today is the Essex ballot item, the merger. I'm Christina Bell and I'm your host. We are here today with Elaine Haney, Chair of the Town of Essex Select Board. Pat Murray, the Vice Chair of the Town of Essex Select Board. Vince Franco, Clerk of Town of Essex Select Board. Sarah Macy, Finance Director, Town of Essex. Evan Teach, Unified Municipal Manager of the Town of Essex and Andrew Brown, President of the Village of Essex Junction. Evan or Elaine, I wonder if you could comment on how Town Meeting will be different this year for the voters. I understand there's an informational meeting that will be live and it will be streamed on March 1st and that there will be voting by Australian ballot Tuesday, March 2nd. Is that correct? That's correct, Christina. Evan, why don't you take a moment to describe all the things we'll be doing for Town Meeting this year? Well, we are in the planning stages for trying to do a hybrid Town Meeting where we are going to be about 99% virtual where there'll be a presentation online via whether I believe it's Teams and then we're trying to work out with the school district whether we can have some in-person attendance for those who don't have internet access so that they can participate at the high school in-person and socially distant. But that hasn't been quite finished yet with the school district. Thank you. Thank you very much for clarifying that for our viewers. If you are watching this live, you welcome your questions at<PHONE_NUMBER> at the end of the presentation. And so now I'd like to turn our attention. Elaine, would you like to start a presentation and get us going? Yes, thank you, Christina. And also just before we begin, I want to say thank you to Town Meeting Television for providing this coverage and providing us this forum to reach our residents during the regular year, not just with COVID. We really appreciate this ability to communicate with folks and I just want to thank our town staff, Evan and Sarah, who are here this evening and Pat and Benson, the select board and Andrew from the Village Trustees for joining us this evening. We will have Q&A at the end as you said, Christina and Andrew will be happy to answer any questions that are relative to the village itself because they voted on their merger vote in November. So I'm going to try to share my screen now and we'll get started. Can everybody see a thumbs up or something? Great. Thank you. So this is the presentation of the plan of merger for the town of Essex and the village of Essex Junction. And as Christina said, the vote will be on March 2, 2021 with an informational meeting on the evening of March 1. So I'm going to talk a little bit about how we got here. So over the last seven or eight years, the town and village have been working together on consolidating services to achieve, eliminate duplication of services and to achieve efficiency and to use our taxpayer dollars as wisely as possible. So we started with a shared services report that was prepared for both boards to talk about ways that we could consolidate to do that savings and efficiencies. The town manager of Essex became the town manager of Essex and Essex Junction around 2015 when both boards decided that we would share a manager and save the costs of that position. Around 2016, the boards integrated the finance and the town and village clerk offices for future consolidation and efficiencies basically because of some retirements and some changes in personnel, we were able to bring them together. In addition, voters approved transitioning the public works budget for the village into the town public works budget so that the entire community was voting, it was paying equally for all the public work services throughout the entire town. And in 2018, we were joined by Unified Manager Evan Teach who took over after Pat Shidel retired and we continued the alignment process and Evan had a directive to continue helping us with consolidation and at that time, the select board and the trustees began to meet jointly every month to discuss joint business together. And at the same time, we also appointed a governance subcommittee with two representatives from each board to discuss possible further consolidations between the village and the town. The first year of their deliberations between 2018 and 19, they talked about a lot of different scenarios and then in 2019, they recommended merger and the boards agreed and the subcommittee was charged with beginning to work on a charter and they proceeded to do a lot of public outreach with surveys and focus groups and we've had a great deal of public participation at the board meetings and now we are at 2020 having completed a draft charter and just this past Monday, the 11th, the select board approved the new plan of merger for the town and that is where we are today and that's why we are voting in March about the new merger charter. So I'm going to turn it over to Pat Murray to talk about why we're considering merger and some of the benefits that we will see. Great. Thank you, Elaine. I'm Patrick Murray. I'm going to talk to you a little bit about why we're considering merger. In particular, in Essex, we feel that merger gives us, in particular, one strength that it has is one government. Right now, the individuals who live in the village of Essex Junction nominate and elect a trustee government and the town of Essex, which includes all those individuals who live in Essex Junction, also nominate and elect a select board. One government allows one governmental body to oversee the entirety of everyone who lives within the town of Essex. This would come with more transparency. It would contain one set of ordinances to be common between the town of Essex and the village of Essex Junction, which does not currently exist. We would be able to continue with Australian ballot budget voting, something that was voted affirmatively in November, and town meeting would now become an informational town meeting. In particular, it satisfies a large group of our citizens who were concerned that the only way they had to say into the budget approval process was to be physically in person at town meeting every year. Now we can present an informational town meeting and everyone can vote at the Australian ballot budget voting the next day. It would allow us to have one land development code and create a more organized and consistent planning. If we'd have the next slide, please. This allows us to see a unified community with a common vision. This unified community can set its course together on a host of issues, some of them we're just starting to tackle, ensuring racial justice, equity, and safety across the entire community of over 20,000 individuals. We can become a welcoming and more inclusive community by creating outreach within the diverse populations that we have living in Essex, where we'll be better able to serve the housing needs that meet the our entire community. The community and economic development will be under one umbrella and can be, excuse me, and we'll be able to preserve open space, continuing the stewardship of the environment so that Essex will contain its continued urban and rural feel. We have first class recreational facilities that will be accessible by all citizens of Essex and no longer will we have priority access depending on which portion of Essex you happen to live on. Finally, we'll be able to build resiliency and sustainability in the systems of our government and the various departments that exist within our town government. Next, I'm going to bring you further through the presentation is my colleague, clerk of the select board, Vince Franco. Vince, you're muted. I am so sorry. Sorry, we're going to talk about some of the benefits for the village and benefits for residents in the town outside the village. We'll start off with tax equity. The goal is after 12 years for everyone in our community to pay the same tax rate for all services provided by the town. A predictable representation and even numbered board of six members assures that the first for the first time both the town outside the village and the village will have an equal number of representatives on the select board. Initially, it removes the extra vote needed for the village budget and election of the village trustees. Now we're going to go on to the benefits for the town outside the village. Again, like the village residents of the town outside the village gain predictable representation with an even numbered board. Equal access to services and programs once offered by the Essex Junction rec department with no village priority and no additional fees for town outside the village residents. Town outside the village residents will have more say in spending, planning and development in all parts of town. Consistent quality of service, pricing and registration for childcare currently offered by EJRP without a waiting list which currently prioritizes village residents and their families. Next slide please. So what's not changing? Our plan honors the high quality of services that both the village and the town currently provide and we are committed to continuing that high quality of service. It also honors our two communities identities by keeping the name of the new merge community the town of Essex. It also includes an unincorporated village of Essex Junction. Now my colleague Pat will speak to some of the challenges of merger. Thank you, Vince. So as we began looking at merger specifically we saw there were a number of challenges that we seek to overcome. First we had to find a way to integrate the 3.5 million dollars of the Essex Junction budget into the 15 million dollar town of Essex budget. We had to find a way to do this while maintaining the high level of municipal services that residents expect and pay for. We want to achieve eventual tax equity. Right now there are a number of residents particularly those who live within the village who do pay for services that they cannot currently utilize. Finally want to make sure that we preserve the identities of the town and the village of Essex Junction itself. So we favor a gradual timeline for this. The town of Essex levies taxes on all town properties which does include the village of Essex Junction which is contained entirely within the town. The village however levies taxes on village properties only. So as a result of this the average village property owner pays an additional 925 dollars a year in taxes. By merging the town and the village budgets all at once this would result in a single one-time yearly increase of 330 dollars for those residents in the town outside the village. And all at once increase like this could result in a desire for significant cost cutting that would negatively affect municipal services undermining one of our primary goals for merger which is to maintain our current levels of service. So the alternative the way that we have come up with to proceed with this it's on the next slide. We favor a gradual approach to the tax equalization. This is adopted to keep tax increases for the town outside the village reasonable affordable and predictable. This is a 12 year time period which coincides with the end of the village's bonded debt and is the length of time preferred by most town residents who responded to a 2019 survey on merger. Next up I'd like to introduce Sarah Macy finance director for the town of Essex and she's going to walk through some of the numbers. Sarah. Thanks Pat. So what does this all look like? Starting with the first merged year the separate town and village budgets would become one budget. The piece of that new budget that was formerly funded by village only taxes would be frozen and phased in gradually over a 12 year transitional period. This will cause taxes outside the village to increase about $26 a year for the average property assessed at $280,000. And for a similarly assessed property in the village taxes would decrease about $35. After the 12 year transitional period tax rates would be equal for all taxpayers. In addition to any grand list growth special taxing districts have been included in the plan of merger to help offset the tax impacts outside the village. One of those is a debt district to ensure that village debt remains with village taxpayers until it's retired in 2035. At which time I will also be thinking about retiring. So what you're seeing on the screen now is a summary of the total cost of merger if the two entities were to merge all at once without any district. These numbers are calculated based on voter approved FY20 budgets and the final FY20 grand list. Just for clarification FY stands for fiscal year. Our fiscal year runs July 1st through June 30th. So FY20 would have been the year ending June 30th 2020. These numbers have been calculated assuming no future growth in the grand list in an effort to clearly isolate the impact of merger. Tax rates are calculated by dividing the budgeted tax levy by the grand list. Therefore any increase in the grand list, which is the denominator, results in a decrease to the tax rate. When we first started this initiative these were the most current figures and while we now have updated budgets for FY21 and we are in the process of budgeting for FY22 the mechanics are the same. You can see here that if the two budgets were combined all at once the impact would be quite large which drove us to explore a longer timeline and the inclusion of special tax districts. The two primary benefits of spreading the tax change out over the 12-year transitional period are to lessen the annual impact of taxpayers and to leverage the growing grand list which will also serve to lessen the impact over time. Next slide please. So this table shows the annual change in taxes when the tax change is spread out over the 12-year transitional period and the village is designated as a special taxing district for debt, sidewalks and capital during that time. At the end of the 12 years these districts would go away. In calculating these numbers I assumed that the dollars raised by the capital and sidewalk districts would then be included in the overall budget causing one final increase in year 13. However it will be up to the future governing body as to how they wish to handle this. I've chosen to make this assumption to get a conservative estimate of the cost but it's equally as possible that the future governing body could eliminate those funds entirely which would eliminate the year 13 column in this chart and change the averages. So you may be asking at this point how on earth were these numbers calculated? Well with many moving parts including the challenge of projecting future years, dealing with new budgets during the process and the complex interconnectedness of the two budgets it was no simple task. In calculating the total impact of merging the two budgets I started with FY20 numbers. I assumed the first merged year would be FY23 and projected out any known changes such as eliminating expenditures that are in both budgets now and accounting for decreasing debt in the town. In determining the annual change over the transitional period that we're looking at now I used the same method and I factored in any known changes in debt load. I attempted to eliminate any variables that were guesses in order to provide a simple conservative estimate. The most significant consequence of this would be that grand list growth over time will decrease these numbers. The town has experienced average grand list growth of 1.6% annually over the last seven years. Next slide please. Quickly I just want to show a visual of how the convergence would happen. When looking at this graph the top line is the FY20 annual tax bill for an average property in the village. The bottom line is the same for a property outside the village. As you can see those two lines remain stable over time and the difference between the two is the $925 more per year that Pat mentioned a village resident pays currently on their taxes. The middle two lines show how the taxes for that same average property would decrease gradually over time in the village and increase gradually over time outside the village to meet at a midpoint at the end of the 12 years. Now this graph is very simple. It does not factor in any anticipated grand list growth. Its purpose is simply to give the viewer a visual of how that 12 year transitional period would work. Next slide please. All right so I've mentioned the special taxing districts that will be included in the 12 year transitional period and I'd like to take a few minutes now to list them out. First we'll have a debt repayment district. This district will be established in order to pay off the village's bonded debt and ensure that just those taxpayers who voted for the debt are paying those payments. This would align with the term of the village's outstanding debt and would be accomplished by establishing a debt service fund and calculating the specific tax rate each year by dividing that year's debt payment by the grand list in the village. The amount of the debt decreases annually and like I said it will be retired in 2035. This district cannot be renewed once the debt is retired. The second district is a tax reconciliation district. This district allows the town to assess different tax rates to the village in order to facilitate that fave in of the village tax levy over the 12 year transitional period and set up all at once. This district also cannot be renewed once the transitional period is over. Next slide please. So while those first two districts are required by the state, the next two have been decided on by the work of the joint boards and the governance subcommittee while designing the plan for merger. This third district is a sidewalk district. The village has a completely interconnected sidewalk network which is aggressively maintained throughout the year to promote public health and safety. Declaring the village a sidewalk district will help maintain this policy. The cost of these activities is currently estimated to be about $125,000 a year. That amount would be accounted for through a sidewalk fund which would be budgeted each year at cost in a separate tax rate just charged to village residents would be established in a way similar to what I described for the debt district. At the end of the 12 year transitional period this fund would come to an end. At that time the elected board and community they could seek to continue or expand the district that would require a charter change. Next slide please. Fourth the village will be designated as a capital improvement district which will keep a portion of its capital infrastructure expenditures separate from the town budget to help decrease the financial impact of merger on taxpayers outside the village. This will be accomplished by taking the budgeted capital contribution in that final year before merger and annually funding that dollar amount each year of the 12 year transitional period. At the end of the 12 year transitional period costs of all capital projects will be paid by all taxpayers. The purpose of the sidewalk and capital districts is to decrease the cost of merger to residents outside the village. Current figures are calculated assuming the funds raised by the sidewalk and capital districts would be absorbed into the full budget at the end of that period. However the future board could decide to do something different such as eliminate the funds which would make the final year increase go away. The last district is a downtown improvement district which does not have any specific tax implications as part of the merger but would remain in place to maintain the village's downtown designation. At the end of the 12 year transitional period this district would also end. And while I would love to continue talking about municipal finance I am going to pass it back over to Vince to talk about representation voting and governance. Vince you're muted again. Oh man. So merger changes the representation voting and governance of the town. We're going to start after the legislature approves the merger the then current town select board and then current village board of trustees will merge into a single interim governing body for a limited time until elections for the new permanent select board are held. The proposed plan of merger outlines the creation of two new voting wards. Ward one includes all areas outside the boundaries of the unincorporated village. Ward two includes all areas inside the boundaries of the unincorporated village. In the proposed plan of merger the new permanent select board would have six members with three seats elected by ward one and three seats elected by ward two. This governance structure differs slightly from the merger charter passed by the village. More on this later. Next slide please. And even numbered board honors the proposed three plus three charter change that was approved by a town-wide vote in March of 2020. Three seats for each ward assures residents of both newly created wards there will be equitable and predictable representation. Ward boundary lines can be adjusted in the future to address variations in population growth between the wards. In November of 2020 village voters approved a merger charter that includes an odd numbered board with three seats for ward one three seats for ward two and an additional seat to be elected by all residents of the new merged community. We will work with state legislatures to reconcile the differences between the two merger charters. And now back to Pat for some additional information on merger. Great thank you Vince. A few bits and pieces here. The new the name of the new community will be the town of Essex. The incorporated village of Essex Junction would then become the unincorporated village of Essex Junction. We have something similar to this in the state already. White River Junction for example is the unincorporated village that contains or contained within the town of Hartford. Australian ballot for voting on the town municipal budget with one informational annual meeting in March. Again this condenses the number of meetings that our residents have to go to and with good conversations with the select board we hope to bring the number of voting days down to a single voting day as well. Reorganize the town and village departments to reduce duplicative services, building codes, municipal plans, ordinances, policies, etc. It's just a way to clean up and reorganize a lot of the currently existing departments that have existed for so long in our communities. The current town and village water and sewer rates will not be affected by the merger. Water and sewer costs including the repairs are paid by water and sewer bills not by property taxes. The new town of Essex will own the Essex Junction wastewater treatment facility however as well as all of the assets that are currently owned separately by the town and the village. Finally we'll go back to our select board chair Elaine Haney. Elaine. Thank you Pat. So we talked about the benefits of merger earlier in the presentation but we must also acknowledge challenges that merger will present and we can refer to them as pros and cons. So some of the challenges for the town outside the village under merger hire taxes over 12 years. As Sarah explained there would be a simultaneous increase in taxes for the town outside the village while at the same time there would be a decrease for the village but this would last only for the 12 years of the merger transition period and at the end of that everyone would be paying the same tax rate. In addition there would be a shared responsibility for all capital projects. After the capital project district ends after 12 years and the village will no longer be paying separately for the projects in that district all residents will pay equally for all projects throughout the entire town no matter where they are located. For the village the village has to contend with a few challenges as well. Merger will mean that they must dissolve their government. There will no longer be a village board of trustees. There will no longer be a village planning commission. It will still retain their state downtown designation however. They will also be giving up priority for certain services. You heard earlier in the presentation that one of the benefits for the town outside the village means that they will no longer be paying extra fees for EJRP recreation services including child care and they will no longer need to be prioritized after village residents which means that village residents will no longer have priority for those services. Everybody will have to sign up for them together at the same time and the village will also have less autonomy. There will no longer be a single budget just for the village to vote on. Everyone will be voting on all of the expenses and spending throughout the entire community together and everybody together as the entire town will also be dealing with potentially longer wait times for infrastructure projects. This is because capital project lists for the village and the town will be combined into one list and reprioritized so that the projects that need to get done first get done first which means that some projects might take a little longer. That's not definite but when we start combining the capital project lists we will need to re-rank them that way. So that's a summary of the merger plan itself and the benefits that we foresee and the challenges that we will have to rise to meet but on the whole the entire plan will be available for you to read and we'll give you some information about that now. First of all we'll talk about next steps. We will hold public hearings on the merger plan on February 1st and February 16th online at select board meetings. This week the legislature is voting on mail-in balloting for town meeting. We anticipate that they will be approving it and going to sending it to governor this week or next and we will be mailing ballots for town meeting to every house in the town. Town meeting itself will be an informational meeting on Monday March 1st both online and in person hopefully as we heard Evan describe at the beginning of the presentation. Voting on the budget and the merger plan will also be via Australian ballot on March 2nd at the polls. Village residents should go to Essex High School, town residents should go to Essex Middle School to vote. If merger passes the charter and the charter the village passed in November will both go to the legislature for reconciliation and approval. We will be waiting to hear from them when they will take them up and we'll work with them to answer any questions they have so that we can secure passage of the merger should it be approved by the voters. This presentation will be available online at the town website sxbt.org the village website sxjunction.org and also our merger website greater sx2020.org. Town residents will also receive a booklet in the mail that has a copy of the charter in it as well as a summary of the charter a lot of frequently asked questions and more reference materials including some of the data that Sarah our finance director presented this evening. Those will be mailed to every household in in the town because we want to make sure that everybody gets this information and we don't want to have to rely on meetings so that due to covid everyone can remain safe so please don't hesitate to reach out to the select board our names and contact emails are listed on the screen call us text us email us ask your questions if you want to have some one of us come talk to you and your friends on a virtual meeting to go over this presentation with you we would be happy to do that please don't hesitate to reach out and thank you very much for your time this evening. Thank you for that informative presentation if you are watching this live the topic for this forum is the merger we're talking about sx we welcome your questions<PHONE_NUMBER> is the phone number you can call if you have a question again that's<PHONE_NUMBER> I'm getting a note from the producer that says there are no calls yet. Christina if you'd like me this is Evan to fill a little airtime well we tell people that there will be in person at the informational meeting again the space is going to be very limited due to the Department of Health requirements we are looking at trying to limit it to those who cannot join us online and we would look to create if approved that we would do this by reservation only we do not want people to show up if they have not made a reservation because there's a space limitation and spacing in the seats in the auditorium great thank you that's so helpful but we do understand that there are people in our community who just do not have access to the internet and they should not be you know precluded from joining in in their civic duties great thank you that's really helpful information do you have any questions of us um a question I have is do you expect that you will have a good voter turnout this year um have you do you have any projections as to how COVID will affect the number of people who can vote and who will vote we were very fortunate to have a very smooth election in November our voters turned in and mailed in ballots in record numbers and the volunteers who are part of our Board of Civil Authority really stepped up to count the ballots to run them through the machines and it went really really smoothly everyone stayed safe everything was accurate so and the turnout was huge and it was a presidential year so obviously that had an impact on it town meeting in general is normally not well attended there's usually about two to three percent of registered voters in the audience at the time so this will be our first time doing Australian ballot approval of the budget so we don't know what to expect in terms of turnout with mail in ballots on top of that there's a lot of unknowns this year but with such a big topic on the ballot merger and then with our first time doing Australian ballot for the budget we're we're hopeful that we're going to have a really decent turnout this time around Andrew I wonder if you might want to speak a little bit to how the village turned out for their vote on the merger but before we do that I see we have a caller Andrew maybe we can come back to you and hold that thought let's see how this is going to work they're going to put this caller on and we'll hear them my question is if s-extruction loses its downtown designation does that affect the act 250 downtown designation Eileen did you understand the question I do um that's a question so the downtown designation is granted by the state of Vermont and it has nothing to do with merger at all in that in that sense it is something that gives a benefit of at waiving certain requirements of act 250 however it's important to be clear that the s-extinction has a village-centered designation and that also has act 250 benefits but the village has to and then the town government after merger we have to just continue to keep that designation up to date with the state so it just would mean um an updating process that happens I think it's every five years Evan perhaps um yeah so we just would have to continue to renew it and then those benefits regarding act 250 would continue to exist great thank you Eileen thank you for your question um we're going to go to Andrew he was going to speak to um let's see I can't see Andrew let's see if I can expand by screen okay good that makes me feel a little more like everybody's here hi so what was the question if I remember correctly the question was about voter turnout and in the village we were able to take advantage of our um of mail-in voting for this past annual meeting I say take advantage but given the fact that it was created by a pandemic I'm not sure if that's truly an advantage at this point in time but at the voter turnout we had over four thousand village residents vote for this this last go-around and in the time that we were waiting for the for the this last question to end I was able to find in the 2019 annual report where in April of 2019 the number of voted ballots was 455 so we had 455 people in 2019 who voted for their elected officials in 2020 we had over four thousand so I would assume that that's a better turnout for most of us as that means that we have more of our residents who are able to express their opinions and to uh authorize their opinions through voting um so to me that's a win and I would expect the same thing to happen on this oh andrew that's so interesting thank you for sharing that with us um that's good news it looks like we have another caller so um let's try again to see how the sound is caller you're on the air can you state your name and state your question hmm we may have lost that caller we're having some technical difficulties so if you want Christina one of the things that occurred uh I think it was November there was a question of whether the citizens wanted to go to australian ballot and while I don't remember the exact percentage I believe it was 70 close to 70 percent of the residents of the village and the town wanted to go to australian ballot which kind of says to us that they really want to participate in local government but they may not want to go to the meeting itself um there's no it's very difficult you know in people's lives they have kids they have other things we give up two three hours to come to a meeting not knowing you know how long is it going to take etc but they do want to participate um and um and and so it I think the voter turnout will be very good if not well you know exceeding in person plus if the state does do mail out ballots um for the pandemic I think we will see maybe not as high as the presidential election which is our highest vote totals but it might start to rival um congressional years sorry I'm getting the note from the producer they're saying that we um we have a caller so let's um let's see what they have to say caller you're on the air can you state your name and state your question this is greg morgan I live in the village and um have been involved in economic development in uh in in the town um on the economic development commission for actually three decades um ethics has an incredible business sector uh leader in vermont in advanced manufacturing with global foundries and gave bloggia to home how do you think this merger will impact our ability to present a unified um face to vermont as we try to keep our community a vital business destination elaine did you understand the question I did and I actually think evan would be a great person to answer that question okay thank thank you unless you don't want to I'll start and anybody could jump in afterwards uh greg thank you for your question and thank you for your dedicated service uh to to our community um I think merger will give a huge benefit that the village in the town combined can go in one direction we we have a plan and we say this is what we want to do um this is we can produce uh promotional materials to go out and recruit companies to come to our community we can recruit uh and promote uh available land that both the village and town have for uh economic development we can have a unified program for tax stabilization programs and other workforce programs that the state is providing to us it will also give us a singular voice to the state legislature right now you have potentially whatever the village may think about a particular issue and what the town may think about an issue but after merger there will be one official stance on an issue uh take cannabis for the instance there's going to be have to be a vote of the community do you want to opt in or do you want to opt out they have serious consequences and it could be bifurcated uh with the village in the town as if anybody knows where those boundaries actually are and you know exactly and what you're allowed to do in the town which are allowed to do in the village uh and with that i'll turn it over to uh elaine or anybody else who may want to jump in on that looks like we have another caller is it okay we go to another call yes okay let's see if we can hear hello you're on the air can you state your name and can you state the question hello hello you're i'm gonna have to put you on speaker because i can't hear you well my question was you mentioned that the town was going to be responsible for the water and sewage um facility and my question is how old is that facility the wastewater and the junction how old is that facility thank you for that question all right i love andrew to answer that actually since it's in the village what boundaries i don't i will admit i do not recall the year that it was originally built but i do know that there was a multimillion-dollar bond to refurbish and really ensure that the wastewater treatment facility remains the the world class facility that it is frankly it has won multiple awards throughout the the region in terms of the quality of the work that happens there as well as the energy efficiency that happens um so the the bond uh or that that loan has i believe been paid off at this point um if it hasn't that bond hasn't paid off at this point in time um so there are no outstanding loans on that and it again remains the award-winning facility that it has been sarah can you confirm whether that bond has been paid off i i think it is but i'm not sure and i'll jump in according to the website it's 1965 treatment started yes it is award-winning right now the wastewater treatment plant is owned by the village of essex junction but it is also operated by it provides sewage capacity for the town of essex and the town of williston who co-fund its operations um when if merger goes through the ownership of the village goes over to the town of which the village is still a member they will still have capacity that stays with that with the system and uh jim jutrus is our wastewater superintendent and he does a fantastic job thank you for your question hopefully we answered it elaine you would ask me about the debt and there there is some outstanding debt for the wastewater treatment facility that facility does service the town of essex the village of essex junction and the town of williston and that's in the tri-town group and all of those um entities contribute to paying the debts and they manage the operating budgets and i assume the debt is paid for by water and by sewer users absolutely so this is an enterprise fund and so it's a self-funded um governmental fund and it is uh funded entirely by user fees so there's absolutely zero impact to property taxes um the wastewater treatment facility and zero impact if you are not uh tied into the sewer system correct so if you have you know a septic and a well not you and just to be clear i the debt that i'm looking at i think is is from the upgrade and not from the original building the facility thank you christina while we're waiting for another call um i'd like to go back to something evan was saying regarding um business impact on mergers impact on business in the community and another thing that we'll be able to do is have a single voice on the um future of the train station and the ability to communicate with a louder voice regarding the um hopefully when the montrealer comes back through and because that was a very big deal for essex when that train came through and also it allows us to have um with with a single town we have a single land development code the single set of building those a single plan and so more consistency more predictability for businesses and that is really important for businesses thinking of expanding in essex or relocating to essex so that they have predictability in impact fees and taxes and policies and procedures so that they know what to expect when they're planning their own business expansions and that's really important and something that doesn't necessarily exist now thank you elaine oh it looks like we have another caller the producer has sent me a message um let's see if we can take this call hello caller you're on the air you have a question can you state your name okay let me lean in let me go ahead and ask your question yeah you're right now yeah go ahead and ask your question and um state your name we'd like to hear hi can you hear me yep you're on the air go ahead you're on here hi can you hear me okay yes yes you're on the air go ahead and ask your question okay hi sure sure hi everyone it's bridge admirer um i have a question about um can i have a question about merging the fire department's direct department in the libraries we can hear you the fire station the libraries why don't we give a little explanation about that and hopefully that will address some of the parts of bridget's question thank you bridget for asking um i'm going to turn that back to evan because as the municipal manager is his responsibility to maintain the organization and he there is a five-year window at the beginning of the merger process where the remaining departments that are not consolidated will be consolidated so evan can speak to that thank you elaine uh the first thing the uh plan of merger calls out is that the libraries do not get consolidated each has their existing boards the sx free library board and the brunel library board the one thing it does change is that town residents can be on the brunel board but they do have the brunel trust has some membership in there that stays um yes the uh plan of merger calls for the manager to present plans for the consolidation of the departments that have not been consolidated to date that would be the village e j r p uh rec department and e pr uh the town recreation department and then the village fire department and the town fire department as well as the last one would be the two community development departments um the village in the town want to be very thoughtful about how this would get done my approach for these types of things would be one to work with the existing directors um two in some cases i'm going to look to hire a consultant um i don't think it is best to just assume we know what's best for those departments they are very intricate they uh involve very intricate work and i'll take for the fire department for example they have different cultures and they have different histories just saying uh let's say in 2023 year can be combined and isn't going to be the right move you need to work with both of them figure out what's the best organizational structure um ultimately developing a unified plan for the structure of the department to provide quality services into well into the 21st century um and so i would be looking for uh a consultant to work with us on all of those aspects including having the fire chiefs and those firefighters and volunteers uh being involved in that and then having a report come to the then select board for uh review and adoption and thank you are you um is it okay with that we go to another call we have one we have enough time for one more call okay yeah let's do that hello caller you're on the air if you can state your name is i know two things in the presentation that the merger purports to provide one being australian ballot voting for budget my understanding is that that was already voted on and is a done deal and that merger plan doesn't really provide that it was already done second question is there was a mention that less fees would have to be paid for parks and recreation for folks out from outside the village my understanding there also is that's been reconciled by a fixed amount of money that the town pays now to the village so that they can pay the same fees so i think that cleaning credit for that maybe i'm wrong i don't think there's a differential currently maybe you can clarify that thanks thank you for your question so that's a question about clarification i can certainly take care of that because it's kind of um i can understand why there's some confusion about that um but if that's not entirely accurate so australian ballot yes was approved by in november we are making sure that it is included in the merger so that what was chosen in november continues into the new merged community we will not be reverting back to regular town meeting and voting from the floor so we include that in the list of things that are happening in merger because we want folks to to know that we are maintaining what they wanted when they voted for australian ballot in november and regarding the fees for sx junction recreation and parks that are paid by the town so on the whole town residents and anyone who doesn't live in sx junction is charged extra for programming by ejrp i believe two years ago at this point the town may even the last year's budget the town provided funding to cover the difference of that differential for programming but not for childcare if i'm correct so under merger every single program that ejrp offers will be the same price for every town outside the village resident as it is for village residents so while it is true that currently the town does provide a small subsidy to cover that difference in fees it does not provide the coverage for all of them so going forward under merger there would be no extra fees for any town outside the village residents to use ejrp programs i can just also briefly address that the other thing that merger does is that payment is also a policy a policy can be changed as boards change with merger that would no longer be a policy that would just be a practice that is ingrained within the organization so it would not go away whereas policies as i said can't change thank you andrew so it is just about 6 30 which means it is the end of our program today thank you to each of you for the information that you provided i know that this is a issue that people want to know more about and so thank you so much for taking your time to share what you know with everyone elaine pat ventz sarah evan and andrew yeah thank you so much and thank you to the audience for tuning in to town meeting tv ongoing coverage of local community candidates budget and ballot items you can find this and more forums at www.ch17.tv don't forget to vote on or before tuesday march 2nd 2021 early voting by mail is available by contacting your town clerk's office polls will be open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. thank you for watching thank you thank you christina thanks to me


I'd like to thank everyone for joining us today. Welcome to today's CNTF webinar titled The Cybernetics of Observability and Monitoring. I'm Carlisa Campos, senior member of technical staff at VMware and also a cloud native ambassador. I'll be moderating today's webinar. We would like to welcome our presenter today, William Louth. He is a complexity scientist at Instana. So before we get started, for real, just a few housekeeping items. During the webinar, you are not able to talk as an attendee, but we do have a Q&A box at the bottom of the screen. You can access that. Feel free to drop your questions there. Actually, we encourage you to use the Q&A as opposed to the chat, because it's much easier for us to manage it. We'll get to your questions at the end of the presentation. We'll stop around quarter to 11 at specific time. And so we are all clear where we are. This is an official webinar of the CNTF and as such, it's subject to the CNTF Code of Conduct. Please do not add anything to the chat or questions that would be in violation of that code. Basically, please be respectful of all your fellow participants, presenters, and hosts. With that, I will hand it over to William to start the presentation. Thank you, William. Thank you. Thanks for the nice introduction. Good afternoon. Well, good evening in terms of where I am based in Europe and Holland. It's probably a good morning in the US. As I said, I'm William Louth. I'm a complexity scientist in Stane. Just a little bit of background on where I'm coming from. For the last 20 years, I've worked in the areas of observability, controllability, and operability. So observability, I mean, that's a new thing. I probably would have called the monitoring before, but nowadays we're referring to observability. And there are my areas, at least in regards to Stane, is I'm looking for new ways of building observability in the systems. New models, models that like you would consider today would probably be tracing logging and metrics. And I'm looking at new models that will scale to the complexity that we have in modern applications. I've also spent many years building controllability in applications, quality of service brought up from the network of applications and resource management. In this talk, I won't be touching on operability, but I also work in operability in Stane in terms of visualizations, how we can help people learn, learn the models that work within their particular architecture environment, and also how the intelligence of the product manifests between the human and the computer or the machines. Now, so probably to give a good perspective on where I come from, it's slightly different than most of the other speakers in this field, which is, I mean, we have 20 years of monitoring even before that, but observability is relatively new in terms of the term itself. So I see observability changing in two areas, two directions. We started from logging, and we've had metrics and tracing where we are currently now. And I see that going in two directions where one is more of a high level, more operational, effectiveness, and DevOps and human or humane. And there I see we're going in the area of signaling. This is something I will touch on in the rest of the talk. The other area is, so signaling is very high level, so it's looking for a model that helps with effectiveness and it's operational. And then the other area is where if you look at logging, we've gone to tracing, metering is another thing. Tracing in today is only about clock time, but metering is about any type of resource. So that's probably the big difference between tracing and metering is that you can have multiple measures between any span or any type of event that you're measuring. Mirroring is where I imagine it's going into what I've built in my past job in Ultalethics or Jinspire, which is where you basically mirror the machine's behavior over into another machine. And then I think the future will be around simulation. And there with all of this, what we're doing is very detailed. So the other one is for the DevOps group. And the other area is really trying to give people more diagnostics capabilities. And it's really about reconstruction, explorative of the reconstruction itself. It's focused on the developer and it's really at the machine level. And I imagine in the future it will really be consumed mainly by machines because I don't think that humans can work at that level anymore, not with this type of persistence of our building. Okay. So to bring in cybernetics, I want to talk about why we need to look at cybernetics review of observability and monitoring. And that's the problem there is the challenges we're talking about is complexity. So what's complex? Well, I mean, we have complicated and we have complex, but what I consider is we look at complex systems. And complex systems are really dense networks. So this is a lot of interconnection and interactions in those interconnections consists of adaptive agents. Now, the agent parts some people chose people because we've had agent technology before, but really to see agent, you could probably say it's a microservice or a library. And we'll come to, you know, cloud is an example of adaptive agent where you purchase a, you know, purchase a service and the service is able to scale up and down, depending on the workload. So and in doing that, it's adaptive. So there is adaptive nature already in our systems today. We are working on complex systems work on multiple scales. And that means that generally it's feedback loops between things and our boundaries and but also our time scales and space scales. And that sometimes feedback loop of one is feeding, is signaling toward a higher level feedback systems. So it's not easy to to drop down layers and still understand each layer, whether looking at the other layers above. And dynamic states is determining what is the current state of a system, current state of a particular subsets of the system, or the state of an entity and that because the environment is changing because it's quite vast. And that's, it's a very dynamic system. And that means that the states of themselves are dynamic. And, okay, so what we started with when you think of topology, so whether you think about interconnections, you could think more on a hardware level, and you talk about hosts or even always precisioning and you have hosts that we've seen containers come along. And then we've seen clusters. And then we have services which have low balances and multiple instances. And you can see in all of this, we're multiplying components, you know, the number of components is increasing. And what we've had is we've had the monoliths where they had some kind of libraries, the, you know, components were embedded within them. And then we have microservices rippling into increasing the modularity of the system. And then, you know, the natural progression is probably to flows and functions where just a pattern of we have self-organizing systems. Or you could say it's the developer, organizing books. And there's some organization within there. Now, the connectivity, which is important to the, to the complexity itself, the important aspect of it. And we can see that in Santa. Like, this is actually a screen, so one of the customers have been standing at the hats. And has, I haven't put the whole number of nulls in there because it overclustered it. But behind that, that line is not some arch form I did. It's actually taken from one of our customers. And there, you know, as you can see, the number of nodes, you know, the APIs are large, the number of dependencies between those and the, the size of the flows, flows, though, which could be considered as a workflow, you could consider as an endpoint within the servers. And you can see that it's, it's getting overhand. It looks complex, or you could say it looks complicated. So I said, cloud is an example of complexity. We have the self-service, the large network access, which is what we require in a complex system, pooling and elasticity. This is the dynamic nature of the environment and metered services, which brings in a kind of control mechanism there, where you can have rate limiting and, and service quality settings. And this of course means that the, the environment is changing on a moment by moment basis. Now, another thing with what we're seeing with complexity of course is change. You know, we've had previously, we had six, every deployment cycles for applications or service were like six to a year, months people would plan, they would do a lot of testing, and then they would release it. The bugs would mount up over time. And then there will be another large release. And then someone would hopefully force those bugs and introduce less, less number of bugs. And that cycle was quite big. Now the, the, the height here represents the number of issues that can come in and how long they stay there. Because the, you know, the, if you have an issue in production and the longer stays, then, you know, of course then the greater the damage it is to the system. And so what we've had is the shorter, we've had shorter deployment cycles, you know, we're now dropping from six months to weekly or to daily. And that also means that we're squashing those issues, we're improving, optimizing the system. It's a continuous process of, you know, process of improvement. And it also means that the any negativeness that we have introduced, you know, in regressions or so is minimized. The impact is minimizing in terms of the time itself. Of course Anna, we're not sure of the, of the nature of the impact itself, but the duration of it is minimized by constantly changing our environment. And the future looks like it will just keep getting even more fine-grained wherever we're having the linements and nearly automatic not even controlled by an operator like pressing saying, okay, I'm going to release now in the next 15 minutes or so. The problem with that of course is that the rate of change and the growth of complexity can put a stress, a stress on a company on an infrastructure. And there are two likely outcomes. You either have adaptive control, well, I wouldn't say just adaptive is a useful way because you're always adapting to what you, what you're sensing within the environment and how, what speeds you can go with change and complexity. And what you really want to do is to regulate the amount of change and the amount of complexity to bring it on into your system. And if you don't able to do that, so that's kind of a steering mechanism for the company. And the company also has to change in line with the rate of change that is happening within its environment and also within its own infrastructure. And if you're not able, if an application or service is not able to keep up with our company, then the natural thing is for it to collapse on the distress of that. And the way to see this is kind of like, I don't know, this sometimes is a hidden missus analogy. But if you remember in terminator two at the end that we had the two 1000 or I think it was the one that was liquefied liquefied, you could see that China constantly changing shape and it couldn't stabilize. And that's what happens really in these kind of environments where rate of change and the complexity keeps getting out of hand that the company doesn't know what or the infrastructure is not able to stabilize. And stability is really a sense of memory. And this is a challenge in operations and observability. Is the environment constantly changing? How do you create a model? Or how do you reason about something that that reasoning can only have 15 minutes of validity? That's the problem. So now I'm going to move on to cybernetics. So that's the problem statement. And cybernetics is kind of like a solution or at least a solution to how we can use observability and monitoring to help us with the complexity and with change. So cybernetics extended definition is a study of control and communication. In the original book, it was about animals and the machines, humans you could say there. And really, the two key things there are control and communication. And it's very like what we see in the DevOps environment. Now, okay, what does control and communication typically when we think of communication in cybernetics, we're thinking of signaling and the control is some type of action or response to that. And you can see a little bit in application systems we've had now today, we've had the reactive manifest or reactive systems and reactive platforms, which is a response to how to handle workload and how to handle variability in the system. So classic example of cybernetics comes down to always the feedback system, the feedback loop. And I'm taking this really from the manufacturer and then I'll try to relate it a little bit more to something else. So there you have in a manufacturer system, you have an assembly line, you have some kind of input coming in to a controller. And the controller has both the input, which is some kind of supply system. And then there's goals given to the controller to regulate that flow. The flow passes along into some kind of, you know, we have activities are being performed in the process that outputs, we output how when it comes out of the into the process, we have an output that is measured by a sensor and that feedback, you know, that's those measurements are fed back into the controller. And this is where I can see is like it can regulate the amount of flow that's going through the system. So if you can think of it like a valve, if you open up the valve and then you can have a measurement at the other end of where it outputs, you can see as you're opening, does it increase the output is a linear to the input or is there some degradation when you start to see the certain rate of flow within the system. And that could see that you're slowing down and then you have to take a corrective action. And that's typically what you're looking at is a feedback system. That's cybernetics. Another way of looking at is coming from the systems thinking or system dynamics where you have an inflow. It's more abstract here. It's more there's an inflow coming in. And there's a stock system, which is kind of like a resource that you're managing. So an inflow will add to a stock. And then as you go outflow, you take from the stock and how you regulate the system is the amount of stock that's in there. And from a program in background, you could probably see that as more like a semaphore, a pool and all the number of tokens or tickets that you can take. And you regulate then your system by looking at how much you give into the stock and how that changes the inflow and the outflow at the rate of dose. A little bit more abstract here, but getting more concrete, if you were to manage maybe like if you're thinking like quality of service, where you had something that had to begin a task, you would have a resource pool, which you could see that as worker threads or something like that. And when you begin an action, so if you look in the middle of this chart here, you have a begin and that takes a reserve, something from the pool. Of course, you take it from the pool itself. And that's the minus sign there. And if it's not there, it doesn't generally do some kind of blocking.  So and then you put that into your reserve pool. And this could be like a reserved two seats. And then later, maybe I have to ring up and someone says, oh, maybe I make a change and I need another additional two seats. Well, I'd need to remember what I already have. And then I asked for another two. And then so you have this reserve pool, which is what you've taken from the resource pool. And then when, of course, when I go and have my dinner with colleagues, you and then you're completed, you release that. And that goes back into the control system. And that allows other people to come to the table. So control there is how much capacity you put into the into the resource pool. And then at the duration of how long someone is in a reserve state and then till they get to the release. So this is where you can find as I can share some links in the Instana website later on this for the information on this. So cybernetics really comes down to feedback flow systems, control about it, controlling the feedback and the flow, and then the communication, which is the sensory feedback, the signals that are going through the system. If you think of DevOps, DevOps is very similar. It's about feedback on the changes that you're making and how, how good those changes are in production, the workflow itself, how much flowing or how much the rate of change that you allow going into the system. And this is where you put in some control. Some people call them error budgets, other people look at the risk levels or so to get more formal. And then of course, you're communicating and communicating between human to human or animal to animal. And then there's communication between man and machine. And even within the process, you know, people won't like to know that there's a system needs has done a change. And that's change can be replicated to other systems, sometimes to a slack to an integration, or even to a standard where we have a pipeline feedback mechanism that allows us to tag a window in the timeline to saying that there was a change here. And that's useful because you're always communicating with other agents in your environment, and those agents can be human or machine, machine here being the slack. So cybernetics then, if you see then what we're seeing where Kubernetes or Kubernetes is that we have operators there that are very dynamic and changing topology changing how the system is structured.  What's going to the challenge in the future will be and how you can bring those two together to able to share, you know, responsibilities, coordinate and collaborate on it, and even handover tasks from one to another in that. And I hope that I believe that cybernetics is probably a way that we need to do that. And we have to look at models of how we can model the system of feedback loops and signaling and resource management and how we can get the votes, the human, the DevOps person, and the operator, the software to understand the system both in terms of resources, in terms of resource modeling and the policies that we have with that. Now, of course, this all sounds like you're looking for something, you know, when you think about this, what we're really trying to do in all DevOps is always have some intelligence. It's intelligence. Yeah. And what does that mean? Intelligence is action appropriate to the context of all these are the forms of intelligence in terms of reasoning. But when we think of DevOps, which is a very action oriented, is that we're looking to make an appropriate action to the context we're in. And then the next problem is what is that context? Because context is the environment, the system, but this is something that is changing. And this is where observability comes into it. So context. Context is the circumstances that form the setting for an event. Sorry, the lag gone off here. So what we're really talking about there is the setting we would naturally think of in terms of an environment and events that are happening within the environment. And they also construct the environment, they have an impact on the environment itself. So when I start with the Instana was formed in 2014, at least the inception part, which is where I came in and then I left shortly after that for the reasons. And I was asked by the Instana group to come up the team itself, the inception team, to come up with how I imagined the future of observability and monitoring was going to look like. And I always believe that the tooling that we're trying to create is really trying to create a story and narrative. And so I look to the film industry, look to film to help explain like what we should be doing, what we should be trying to construct, what is the context we're trying to reconstruct or simulate. And film, of course, you have these kind of things here. You have a setting, a scene, an act, and there's sequence there, and then you have something, you know, there's actors within the scene and they have some behavioral changes there. And of course changes within the environment happen. So, and these are all happening at with lower level of events. And so this is what I mean by context. Context is really the reconstruction of an event within that environment, at least to enough that it can make sense to us of what the system looked like at that time in terms of the nodes of the apology, what flows were happening, and what it was the health of the system itself. So that's what we're trying to do always observability is reconstruction. And so, but the definition of observability, which is has changed, you know, in the last few years, the original definition was the inference of internal states of a system from the knowledge of its external outputs. So the state there where we're talking about would probably be more health state, the quality of what it was doing, was it operating, because observability was really around a measure, a measure of can you understand the state of the system and states tend to be conditions. And it's a very limited number of conditions, at least when we think about modeling, because if we didn't think about a system had a million states, it wouldn't really be a very useful model. So generally what we always do, we try to group them into categories of states where they represent this is a good state, you know, a healthy and okay state, the graded state, effective state. So we take these kind of higher levels of categorization of a state. And that's what observability is you should be trying to do. So observability is and how we do that is of course, coming back from cybernetics is you're always looking for signals within your environment. So an observer is observing other systems. And this doesn't mean that the observer is outside the system, it could be once microservice looking at another service or agent looking at another agent, but they're observing each other's behavior. And those and certain behaviors are signals. And from those signals, we infer a state. But the best way to see this, if you think about animals, because you know, animals also have signaling. And animals like will make aggressive moves like they will move their hands up and shout and growl. And generally that signal is a signal of aggression. And, and if that happens, frequently enough, or at least consecutively, we probably unfair a state of that this animal is wild or, you know, or crazy or angry. And this is the state we infer from it. So an observer is looking for that. And that's the way we should be considering observability of systems. So observability today in terms of when we look at a legacy model, we think about traces. This is distributed tracing or even local tracing. We think of metrics, which is your little dots on your chart over timeline and log, which is echo chamber for our developer writing strings themselves. And in the past, we've had that where we put them into tables, they go into the databases on single data store or tables to map each of the types. And then we had a console where we query the dataset and chart it. And that's what we really had up to a few years ago. The modern way is really to think about sensors. And we're really moving into multi sensor environment. We have sensors who are making collections. These are generally being passed on to agents because we can't always get to the backend systems that we have. And sometimes we're writing to multiple backend systems. So just generally agents are placed in there and are really channels for pushing those collections off into another system. And there this other system is generally acting like a fusion. It's taking all the sensory data and fusing it into to make sense of it. So it's taking metrics, it's taking traces, it's taking logs, it's taking the apology, discover the configuration and then reconstructs a model, which is the fusion, like a topology of system. And the apology structurally could be, you know, the nodes, the hosts that are all living in. And the apology could also be the call graph. And there what it's focused on, of course, then once it's done a model is focused on change. But change is not really what we want. We know change is always happening. So that really is not a very useful thing to be constantly monitoring. I mean, you can monitor the rate of change, but it's not going to tell you much unless you have a means of classifying those changes. And then you look for signals for those and then to derive a status, because at the end of the day, what we're always trying to do is what determine the status or the state of one or more of our systems that could break into the subsystems. Just check them out. Okay. So that's what we've had. And I think we're also seeing in the observability spaces we're moving from. And this is where recollection was probably more of the legacy view. We go back to the legacy where we had these tables. And what we did there is we had search and capability. So we search, we do the recollection is what happened at this point in time.  But the problem there is what should you be searching for. And this is, this might have not been so much of a problem before when you were working with a model that didn't change until, you know, it didn't change less every six months or so. So you could build up some knowledge. But when everything is changing rapidly, and there's very little memory in there, what you really want to do is the system to focus on recognition, recognition of similarities or, you know, recognition that something is even different. And then signify, you know, of course, once you can recognize something, then you can give significance to where and that can be, you know, insignificant or insignificant. And then what we want there is, is suggestiveness. We want the tooling or the monitoring solutions to be more suggestible what we should look at rather than those searching or exploring. We just simply, I don't think operations today have simply the bandwidth to go around exploring. And it probably would have been useful to previously when we didn't have such systems that we have today. But with the change, with the growth and the complexity, with the number of entities, I don't think that's scalable anymore. So maturity, we have to move to more recognition and suggestive solutions like inspections or advice tools for a human to scale as opposed to a machine. So why do we observe? So we come down to we think of observability. Why do we observe? Well, in the more the generalist term is to monitor signals. We always hear, I'll come back to what signals are later. But of course, everybody is, is taking measurements and hoping from in there, you know, that we know the measurements have a lot of nice and then we're looking for a signal. But no one really knows what a signal is. But generally, that's what we're looking for. We're looking to monitor signals in the environment. So this is why we observe. Why do we monitor, of course, is why would we just keep watching for signals? Because we want to control states. Our infrastructure is something that we're responsible for. So and the way we can manage that is by looking at the states of the system. So we're, when we look to control states, we're really trying to manage the service quality to manage the service that we're delivering. So we have to look towards control to help us to manage observability. It gives us that context. It reconstructs something for us. But at the end of the day, we still need to reason about it and act on it to manage our system. So observability. Observability is basically a subordinate or servant to controllability. And controllability is really where we're all going. And controllability can manifest in that there's a machine taking over control and self regulating itself or controllability could be just humans responding to what they see within their observability or monitoring space. So controllability is being able to direct or influence the behavior on the course of events in our systems. And how it fits in with observability is controllability needs observability for perception to reconstruct to create the context. And then controllability needs to have some kind of monitoring capability that tells us what it should attend to. And then when there is something of significance, what actions should it respond to? So that's where controllability comes into it. Now, I'm going to touch a little bit because when we come to cybernetics, you know, cybernetics is really about control, but it's about control of other systems. And you can also have second order cybernetics, which is control of the controller. So when you think about controllability, you can also apply it to monitoring because you have to observe. Observe observation is an action and observation. If it's an action that needs can be regulated, then you have basically some kind of control feedback loop. So monitoring, which some people would like to imagine monitoring is the old traditional way where you were your pin your server and you say, are you up or down? And I think that was used those are used usefulness to that because it would focus really on the state of the system. But it really didn't give us an accurate assessment of it. And that was unfortunate. But I think monitoring still is here today. I think we are associated, when we think about monitoring, we always associate with a technology or a tooling. And it's really a process. Monitoring is the process that manages how we observe our environment. So that's what I want to talk about is because there's always a bit of this observability versus monitoring and observability is even greater than monitoring or bigger than monitoring. I think observability probably looks at more data than monitoring, but monitoring is really about steering observability, because there's only so much we can collect. And we've had this with profiling agents, where profiling agents are have a depth of mechanism, they look at their own overhead and they adapt. And that to me is a monitoring capability, where it's determining, you know, is this event useful or not? And that's really what humans want. Our operations should be focusing on, is I want until that helps me manage the degree of observability within my environment, because I simply can't store everything. It also increases overhead in storage costs, increases overhead in cognitive workload for both the machine as well as human.  And observability today tends to be like sliced down or siloed like, here's tracing, here's logging, here's, here's something else, and here's like advance or so. And so you monitoring is really that fusion, it's integrating the senses, and it's reconstructing memories, because observability is really a collection system. It might allow you to explore, it might allow you to search, but it's not about reconstructing the memory, because we know memories are multi facets, and that means we have to integrate multiple senses, and we have to give a significance and relate it to what is of interest to us, which is how we make representations. So monitoring is about identifying patterns that observability is not focused on observability is about collecting them, and assigning significance to them, aiding the reasoning of the human and the machine, and guiding our action in there. And of course, we want feedback on the actions that we take to help regulate our observability, and also what we've done in terms of control itself. So action can also manifest in action towards observability, or action to the context of the environment that we're doing here. So what I'd like to see then is there, but how I paint monitoring and management versus observability and controllability, so observability is seen, and the controllability is reacting in action on it, is that there's a strategic track or lane, and then there's a tactical, and the tactical is the day-to-day operational observability and controllability. The operations, what control do they have in their environment? And the observability feeds data into the monitoring, the monitoring feeds data signaling or, you know, regulations, policy back into observability. And controllability is also feeding into monitoring, and monitoring is also helping to regulate also the controllability there. And it's the same with controllability is feeding into management. Management is really management's view is how much change do we want to take in our environment? How can we do that change, which comes down to controllability? How can we monitor that change or the success of that? And then how do we see that change is happening? And that's probably the way to see it, switching zigzagging from the strategic and tactical. And there's a maturity track in that, so maturity is really going from observability to monitoring, as in at least my definition monitoring, which is the modern version and not in terms of product specific like pinging. And then the maturity is from the top to the bottom, observability to monitoring to increase controllability in the system, both machine and man, and scaling that, and then of course to management, which is always about the policies of that change. So observability is looking, monitoring is seen, controllability is acting, and management is regulating. That's the way I like to see it. So just another way of seeing observability and monitoring is observability is given a sensory data, and monitoring is the semantics that we attach to the sensory data and the significance we derive from that. So you can see that the sensory data as it moves up from the bottom to the top left hand corner is really getting smaller, and that's where we increase significance because we're really lucky to all to get greater significance by crunching down that data and turning it into information. So well, some people call it data, but there's some math in there. Okay, effective monitoring then depends on connecting, on contextualizing. And when I mean connecting, I really mean rebuilding, reconnecting association of we have made a change, that change is rippling into the environment. We then connect that back to the control that we want to have on that. And then the context is building, rebuilding our environment of what it looks like. So an observability to is always rebuilding context. It's building a memory in a moment of time where it says, this is what the system looked like. This is what the apology looked like in terms of hardware, containerization. Containerization I mean in a very general sense is one thing is contained within another, which is the isolation, and then the flows that cross over those boundaries. And so what we want to do is keep speeding up that change, connecting that change back to the control of the change that does happen, the effects within the environment, and then relating that rebuilding a context, a new context that represents that new state. So we're in the home straight now. This is where we get on to cognition. And I'm I'm sorry, I'm just looking at my time. So I think I got nine minutes to get this over, probably okay. And then I'll take questions for the last 10 minutes. So cognition is the kind of it's I've changed the color here to purple because I see this is where we're heading. This is the future. And this is really what we're all looking for. And like when you buy a product that says AI ops, or something that says intelligent deals, and you know, you're really looking for something that is cognition within what we're collecting and what we're monitoring. So what is cognition? And that's the process of acquiring knowledge, understanding through taught experience and the senses. So experience could be the reconstruction of episodic memory, or even the memory itself, living it. And of course, we have to do to create an experience, we need a sense, we need the sense of the environment we're in. And then we have to think through that we have we create representations from the experience and from the senses. And it's not sequential, of course, because taught itself impacts experience and a sense it's there because there's regulation there. So the more attentive you are to something, the more you see the more the thought you can consider on that to give the thought that you give to it. And then the experience heightens. So it's the circular processes between those systems. Now, my interest is that what I see how we're going with microservices and to other types of systems of modularity and flow is that it's a social network. We're seeing nodes come up there. And we're seeing microservices not be just more of a call, I make a call to something else, and it returns a response. What we're seeing today with microservices and other types of messaging system is that there's a lot of metadata being transmitted, that the interaction that we're seeing with services is not send and give me the data back. There's more like, oh, I'm going to drop the data because I'm overloaded at the moment. Oh, there's some rate limiting. So I'm going to have to slow you down for a bit. There are some handshaking going on. So we've gone from RPC, which is, you know, the remote procedure calls to what I consider conversations, conversations between services. And you see this with the reactive manifest where they're trying to signal when they are available to or when they want something else to be recreated and consumed by them. There's a mechanism going on beyond the call itself. So there's like two channels. There's the data channel, which is here's the request, here's the response, but then there's the control channel within that, which is, you know, whether I'll accept it now, whether I've taken it, but I've actually dropped it into a queue and I will give you a call back later. And if you see that, it's a very, it's very human-like. So so I considered in, you know, where we're heading is kind of a like social cognition, which is the study of how people process store and apply information about other people. And I think that's probably the way to see the future of observability and monitoring, and especially in the microservices, or any type of service where it could be down to even a Lambda or a task or an event handler is, is we're looking to how services process, store and apply information about other services in a system context. So it's not so much now about the workflow that we're looking at, but also we're looking at other services. So if you think more concrete, maybe it's a bit too high in the sky with that one, if you think about you have a second breaker, a second breaker is kind of cognition, is that if when something breaks, if you try to access the database and a few times it fails, then you put it into you kind of you, you say, okay, I'm not going to go near that database until it starts to I'm going to refuse the next few requests that come in and say that the service is not available and wait and not overload the other database and then tell them to call back later or refuse the connection there and then before talking to the database. And what you see then is a kind of a sense that like what we would have in the workplace, where if a manager was walking over to someone's desk and before we had these old paper cabinets and people with trays where people would put the work in the tray, if you came over to a person and you seen their work in the tray was, was quite high, you wouldn't drop the new work in there, you would probably look for another service to do that. And that's really what we're doing, we're, we're seeing services take on this new semantics and it's actually quite challenging for observability tools because we can't know the distinguish between, so let's say you service talks to another service and the first few times it's time sold or fails and then it does have a retry policy and then it succeeds. Now, that service where the caller service will report back to its client that it succeeded and we wouldn't be aware to if it succeeded and what it needed to do because it eventually got there. And even though the other service failed in terms of the conversation with the calling services succeeded eventually. And so how do we do that observability? Because how does a trace tool focus on trace know when, well, okay, we are, we're, we're, we're allowing failure, but so I can ignore these traces because the final trace succeeded. So we, we can't seem to capture that today with distributed tracing. So we have to do something different. So I see what we're doing with service condition cognition is how services process and store information about other services is, is looking at how services interact with each other in a more dynamic and adaptable way in sensing the other service. So if you sense that the time of the other services slowing down the response time, you might change your own behavior in terms of how quickly you call it. Now, the way they would do that of course is signaling and there is kind of signaling already there today. It's like HTTP codes have that where they can say I've dropped you or I'm overloaded. So we do have signals already embedded in systems. Yeah, we just need to formalize and create a universal signaling glossary that works across whatever protocol I have. So signals are involved to convey meaning and influence to receivers. So the signal in itself is to tell something information. And of course when someone receives a signal, they are meant to change the behavior. And that's why people send an error code back or a HTTP code back because they say redirect this or I'm dropping this or I'm delaying you or this is to try to change the behavior of the caller. So senders obtain effects and receivers obtain, yeah, thank you, obtain two minutes to go, receivers obtain information. So the cycle is very similar to the feedback systems where a signal is transmitted, it's transmitted over some kind of medium, there's a receiver, the receiver records it, he reasons about it and responds. It already already feels like cybernetics and feedback feels like what we do with observability. So a signal is very different than a message or from a log in that the signal just the signal itself has a meaning. There is no difference between them. You don't have to unpack the message and look inside of it. This is where a log in fails is that logging is not a signal, it's a message and inside of that we hope to derive a message. But really what we should be looking at in the future is more focus on just sending the signal, the meaning directly. And of course how do we do that in the environment is well we can look for a solution like StigmaG which is a mechanism of coordination and through an environment between agents and actions. And typically you have an agent or a microservice that creates actions. These leave signals or signs within the environment and the medium. And the kind of classic example is ants going around when they find foods, they put a pheromone down on the surface of a, you know, like a grid and then a patch and then another ant picks it up and follows along. So this is where basically the history of previous actions affect or stimulate or dampen the effects of future actions. So the effect stimulates and it could be both negative or positive and action and produces more effects within the environment. And that's what we probably need with signal. What I'm working at in Steine is on signifying and whereas where I try to create a universal signal in language and mechanism for inference of state around services, resources and contexts is context of the environments where existing in the resources are scheduled like Kubernetes and services, which is the systems microservices that we have. And this is the final slide. Just up there. So just to recap, when we look at what I think we're moving to is it's not going to scale with metrics, traces and logs. We have millions of metrics. We have even more of traces and logs and people just don't know how to give significance to them and classify them. And it's never going to happen on the back end. So if the metric is not already has a signal and has significance at its name, it's more than likely not going to be useful to management. So what we need to do is bring in a newer form of observability technology around signals that can translate into states that we all agree like state is page, we have these various the states. And that's and that's is how we drill down into metrics and traces. We look for states when states change to something that's interesting. We look at the signals that generated that from the signals we we determine the time windows which are useful for looking at metrics, traces and logs. So I'm finished a little bit wrong one minute. That was great. Thank you William. I'm surprised I got through it. Very good. And now we have some time for Q&A. Again, please drop your questions on the Q&A box. It's at the very bottom there on the off the screen. And I have a question here for you from Christian Hayden-Rick. Apologies if that was mispronounced. The question is in the beginning you talked about metering being an evolution of tracing. Can you tell us more about what that means? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So when I worked my previous company, which is Autolethics or Jinspired, I focused on creating a matrix for the machine, the matrix world. And what I did there was and how I distinguished that between tracing is that CIMS, which is what the name is like CIMS is in the game, but it has an SZ in it, it seems try to reconstruct behavior, reconstruct it, how code executes. So if you take at the fundamental level what code is in terms of what you know how it runs in most systems is there's threads running, they execute or sometimes nowadays go routines, they execute calls which are stack pops and you know pushing and popping out stack frames. And then of course this is how we create scope of execution. So what I did with CIMS was I said well fundamentally this is what all machines do, they're just pushing and popping frames. Now ignoring the code that happens within it, you know, there are some calculations, everything else is about methods being calling another method. So what I did there is I instrumented the JVM and every method call was creating an event and that event was streamed over into another environment where the event replayed all of the event stream. So you could think about event sourcing, but what's different about it is that it wasn't executing the code, it was mirroring the code, it was mimicking it and it would recreate the threads and it would actually create a pop push and pop the stack frames like they were there and it would even delay them to the duration that they were in the environment. Of course you could also speed it up if you wanted, but it mimicked behavior and probably the best way to see that is like if you think about a mine artist on a street where he is cleaning the windows, we know he's not cleaning a window but we know from this movement that he's mimicking the cleaning of a window. So what I did there, mirroring is basically mimicking that. So mirroring then in terms of tracing how it differs, tracing today is not really being designed to allow the reconstruction of the replay of a machine like it had happened in the real world. So Sims said let's create those events, stream them in and have enough information in it that we can actually reconstruct the flow of it and to another product or another monitoring tool it would look like I am the actual application and I'm doing everything even though you wouldn't be changing the bank account twice and that's what mirroring is. It's the reconstruction of, I hope that's explained it. Okay. It would be like a one way to do it. Actually I think the best analogy and I should have said this was you dream. So today we do an action, we use the same mechanism, our same system in play when we're looking at something and we're doing something in the real world but when we dream, our dreams are very vivid, we experience it but we don't have action. We don't go, our control system is turned off and that's what Sims was trying to do. It says I will replay your memories but you will not be a danger to yourself. You won't be sleepwalking. I'm going to ask you the next questions. We have five more minutes only but before you answer this question, William, would you tell us very quickly how people can reach you for other questions that we have in the queue? We're not going to be able to answer all of them if there is a way. Yeah, well they can always link in or my email address is william.lout at instana.com. William.lout at instana.com or if they can just have a chat. Oh, I also have a Twitter account, Autoletics, A-U-T-O-L-L-E-T-I-C-S. So there's also a Twitter account, Autoletics. And Autoletics is actually a name for flow. It's from a book. The book is Flow and Autoletics is type of people who like to experience flow. And that's what I try to do. Tons of learning on this webinar. We have four minutes left. This next question on the Q&A box from Luis Sanchez. Could you comment where instana is in terms of the levels of your less light in parentheses, the pyramid from traces logs to states? Yeah, well instana is definitely covering all the boxes in terms of the log in the basic of observability. And the reason I've rejoined in instana and came back in is to bring in the signifying technology. There will be announcement coming out shortly in that. But instana has pretty much covered the whole observability space. But of course with the growing complexity is and we have to come up with new management models. And this is the feedback system. So instana is branching out into other areas and looking at how do we see feedback? How do we better support DevOps and not just diagnostics? It's great. It's got great diagnostic capability. And it's also able to discover and automatically and dynamically the context. Reconstruct your topology, reconstruct those call graphs. And that's wonderful. So that's basically a great foundation for me. It's not just taking traces. It's also got the environment context. But what it would miss today, even though it has it to some degree with incidents in the product, is this more state management is significant. And probably it's still early days for people to see why we need new observability, something like signals, because they're still trying to get, they're still moving to microservices. They're still bringing it over. So they haven't got to the scale out yet. And they're still, you know, working with observability tools. And there will be a moment where they kind of feel that these things are not working for them. And I recently did a talk where someone said that, yeah, the manager in the company had said, and this is more the business process level, he said, I don't want anybody producing a metric that I cannot associate an action with. And I think we haven't came to that realization in the space of observability and monitoring. We're in this kind of big data Hadoop base where everybody is just give me more data and it's grabbing. It thinks if I keep collecting more, that's going to be useful. But we're going to get, as these systems evolve, and in this greater adoption of microservice platform, we're going to see these kind of problems come up. And there's going to be a need for a language that can help man and machine. And I hope Signify will do that. That's what I'm working on. All right. Thank you so much for the answers, William. This is all the time we have today. Thank you so much, everyone, for participating. And we look forward to having you in our next CNCF webinar. The recording of this webinar will be out later today. Thanks again. Thanks, everybody. Coming. Cheers. Bye.