The OpenTelemetry Hero’s Journey: Working with Open Source Observability

Having correlated metrics, traces, and logs from our services and infrastructure is a vital component of observability. We will discuss what’s possible with OpenTelemetry and where the gaps are with today’s open source tools.

Modern Application Debugging: An Intro to OpenTelemetry

In this talk, I'll be sharing my insights and experiences with OpenTelemetry, an open source project that offers protocols, APIs, and SDKs for collecting metrics, traces, and logs from applications and services. I will cover the tools provided by the OpenTelemetry Community, including the Language SDKs, the Collector, and the OTLP formats for Metrics, Traces, and Logs.

I'll demonstrate how to instrument and observe a microservices application running on a Kubernetes cluster, utilizing the resources that OpenTelemetry has to offer. By the end of the presentation, you will have a deeper understanding of how to use open source tools like Jaeger and Prometheus to analyze the telemetry signals from your application.

Join me as I delve into the fascinating world of OpenTelemetry, sharing my knowledge and expertise to help you make the most of this powerful technology in your own projects.

Presented at:
DevOps Days NYC 2023

Where’s the Auto in Auto-Instrumentation? A look at current automation strategies with OTel

“Automatic Instrumentation” can mean a lot of things depending on context. Whether we’re discussing the Instrumentation SDKs or full-kernel observability with eBPF, the promise is the same: end-to-end observability coverage with no custom code and minimal setup.

First, I will review how the different mechanisms available for automatic instrumentation work within each of the 11 languages supported by OpenTelemetry. I’ll examine:

- how code-path instrumentation works at the library level by diving into the Node.js OpenTelemetry Extension and the JavaScript libraries it supports
- automatic instrumentation via attachment with Java and Python
- automatic instrumentation injection using the OTel Operator for DotNet, Java, and NodeJS

Finally, I’ll take a peek at the future of automatic instrumentation of compiled binaries with a look at the Go instrumentation library built using eBPF.

In this talk will attempt to clarify the different mechanisms that are often colloquially lumped under the term “Auto-Instrumentation” and help to clarify for end users exactly what is possible within each supported language. I will answer questions that I hear often about instrumentation such as “will I need to modify my application code?”, “will it work without Kubernetes?”, “Will I be able to use the libraries I’m currently using?”, and “how can I use this in a completely custom code base?”