A family STEM project: Learning monitoring and observability with your child (and a plant!)
04 Jul 2025
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Marie Cruz
Recorded today, a brilliant talk with Marie Cruz, Senior Developer Advocate at Grafana Labs — coming soon to Ministry of Testing!
In “STEM in the garden: How to monitor plants with IoT sensors and Grafana Cloud”, Marie shares how an at-home STEM project with her daughter, using a soil moisture sensor and Grafana Cloud, became a fun and practical way to explore monitoring, observability, Prometheus, IoT, and more!
“Monitoring is checking the plant’s health. Observability is understanding why it’s changing.”
— Marie Cruz
A beautifully simple explanation, rooted in real-world learning.
This talk is not only a fun STEM activity for families to try (and a clever way to remind your kids to water the plants!), but also a valuable starting point for testers looking to build confidence in monitoring, observability, and system health; skills that help drive better questions and deeper collaboration in teams.
Keep an eye out for the full talk coming soon to MoT site
Get a head start with Marie’s GitHub project: https://github.com/mdcruz/plant-monitoring
In “STEM in the garden: How to monitor plants with IoT sensors and Grafana Cloud”, Marie shares how an at-home STEM project with her daughter, using a soil moisture sensor and Grafana Cloud, became a fun and practical way to explore monitoring, observability, Prometheus, IoT, and more!
“Monitoring is checking the plant’s health. Observability is understanding why it’s changing.”
— Marie Cruz
A beautifully simple explanation, rooted in real-world learning.
This talk is not only a fun STEM activity for families to try (and a clever way to remind your kids to water the plants!), but also a valuable starting point for testers looking to build confidence in monitoring, observability, and system health; skills that help drive better questions and deeper collaboration in teams.
Keep an eye out for the full talk coming soon to MoT site
Get a head start with Marie’s GitHub project: https://github.com/mdcruz/plant-monitoring
Sarah Deery
Learning and Development Lead
She/Her
My main aim is to help quality professionals turn their vast knowledge and skills into bite-sized chunks that the community can digest.
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