How I solved production issues with OpenTelemetry (and how you can too)

Ensuring the reliability of your Java applications is critical in today's fast-paced world. But how do you identify and fix production issues before they get worse? With cloud-native applications, it can be even more difficult because you can't log into the system to get some of the data you need. The answer lies in observability - and in particular, OpenTelemetry.

In this session, I'll show you how I used OpenTelemetry to solve several production problems. You'll learn how I uncovered critical issues that were invisible without the right telemetry data - and how you can do the same. OpenTelemetry provides the tools you need to understand what's happening in your application in real time, from tracking down hidden bugs to uncovering system bottlenecks. These solutions have significantly improved our applications' performance and reliability.

A key concept we will use is traces. Architecture diagrams often don't tell the whole story, especially in microservices landscapes. I'll show you how traces can help you build a service graph and save you hours in a crisis. A service graph gives you an overview and helps to find problems.

Whether you're new to observability or a seasoned professional, this session will give you practical insights and tools to improve your application's observability and change the way how you handle production issues. Solving problems is much easier with the right data at your fingertips.

My goal for the attendees of this session is to get them excited about using OpenTelemetry (the industry standard) as a way to improve observability, so they can learn from their own software in production and improve what is needed.
And I will show how to use Grafana to visualise the data, as I believe that visualisation is a very powerful way to get more insights.

Unleash the power of distributed traces

Some of your customers are complaining about timeouts but your graphs show no problems, can you find the hidden timeouts? Can you see why some requests are failing? What is different about them compared to successful requests? How many times has this happened in the last week?

You have probably heard of observability and OpenTelemetry. Traces and spans are a core concept of OpenTelemetry. Spans can help you answer the questions above.
Traces are often associated with HTTP requests, but it they can be used for much more, such as database queries.
But do you know how to use span attributes and resource attributes? I will explain the differences. Do you know about span events? And how to record exceptions on a span?
In this talk I will show you how to use distributed traces in a microservices landscape using OpenTelemetry.

There are 4 parts I will talk about:
1) how to (auto)instrument your code to create spans, add attributes, record exceptions and other use cases of span events
2) how to store traces in Tempo
3) how to query for all the details to answer your questions with Grafana
4) how a service graph, created based on traces, gives an overview and helps to pinpoint the problem

After this talk, you will know how to use OpenTelemetry to enrich your spans and how to find those spans with relevant information.
Join this talk to supercharge your spans and help you answer all these questions!