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Independent, vendor-neutral observability advisory for IT and engineering leaders in regulated enterprises.
I help you close the gap between the dashboard and the outcome. Banking-grade operational discipline, no platform to sell you.
If you run operations in a bank, an insurer, or any environment a regulator cares about, you already know the version that keeps you up. A green board that tells you nothing about whether the payment cleared. Alerts nobody owns. A platform that looks observable and behaves like a black box the moment it matters.
This is not a tooling problem. It is a leadership problem wearing a tooling costume. That is the problem I work on.
Twenty-five years leading IT operations and observability in banking and government. I modernised monitoring across 40+ countries at Standard Chartered, built the observability function from nothing for Abu Dhabi's TAMM platform serving 3.2 million citizens, and designed metrics and the Dynatrace business-events programme for three of Lloyds' largest payment applications, inside a payments-resilience initiative under PRA, FCA and Bank of England oversight.
I wrote the book on this. Literally: Metrics & Mayhem: A CTO's Guide to Observability That Actually Works. I also host the Metrics & Mayhem podcast and publish the Mastering Observability newsletter, where I work these problems out in the open. And I am vendor-neutral. I do not resell platforms and I am not paid by them. I tell you what actually moves the number.
A fixed-scope review of one part of your observability, one platform, one service domain, or a defined set of questions. Not the whole estate, and we agree exactly what is in scope before we begin.
How it works:
1. Prework, before I arrive. You complete an intake pack: access, current dashboards and alerting, recent incident data, and the people I need to speak to. The work does not start until this is in. It is what makes the rest deliverable.
2. Review and interviews. I work through what you have supplied and I talk to your people. The conversations matter as much as the data, and I do not skip them.
3. Findings and roadmap. A written assessment of what is working, what is theatre, and a prioritised roadmap, plus a readout session to walk your team through it.
Most assessments turn up two or three things worth real work: a metrics methodology that ties signals to business outcomes, an alerting model people will actually trust, an ownership structure that survives a 3am incident, or a roadmap you can take to the board.
I take that on as advisory, scoped to your situation. A few focused days, or a few days a month, whatever the problem needs. No retainer you have to justify, no scope you don't.
Advisory from £1,250 per day. Scoped and quoted per engagement.
You can keep buying tools and hoping the outcomes follow. They haven't so far, and the data says they won't. Or you can run a focused assessment and find out what actually needs to change, with someone who has done it under real regulatory pressure.
Start with the call. No pitch, just a conversation.