best talks day 1:

* Please, no More Minutes, Milliseconds, Monoliths... or Monitoring Tools! - Adrian Cockcroft
  * gave 5 good rules for monitoring systems, showed what cloud / microservices monitoring looks like @ Netflix 
* Simple math to get some signal out of your noisy sea of data - Toufic Boubez
  * explains why static alert thresholds don't work and gave 3 techniques to use instead
* Car Alarms and Smoke Alarms - Dan Slimmon
  * how to use sensitivity and specificity in monitoring, some good math
* Metrics 2.0 - Dieter Plaetinck
  * metrics20 = redesign of graphite that fixes a bunch of problems, keep an eye on this project
* StatsG at New York Times - Eric Buth
  * the first half of the talk on ops philosophy was really interesting, second half about statsg is not so useful

best talks day 2:

* "Auditing all the things": The future of smarter monitoring and detection - Jen Andre
  * really awesome security talk, lots of good practical steps for us
* Is There An Echo In Here?: Applying Audio DSP algorithms to monitoring - Noah Kantrowitz
  * shows how to use audio processing techniques on monitoring data, good math, very interesting
* 

recurring themes / big takeaways:
* monitoring must scale ahead of the underlying system
* high frequency monitoring, waiting minutes for a check result or alert is bad
* collect data on everything using graphite
* only alert when work isn't getting done, RAM / swap / CPU / etc. are not something you should alert on
* manually watching graphs & dashboards doesn't scale
* start using anomaly detection
* static thresholds do not work for data from the data center
* do more analysis, understand your data, do more scatterplots, histograms, find distributions, correlations, etc.