Juliano Costa
CNCF Ambassador | Developer Advocate at Datadog
Linz, Austria
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Juliano Costa is a Developer Advocate at Datadog with a focus on OpenTelemetry. He is a CNCF Ambassador passionate about fostering the Cloud Native community and spreading OTel's word everywhere he goes. Juliano is an active contributor to the OpenTelemetry project and a maintainer on the OpenTelemetry Demo, as well as on the Developer Experience SIG. When he's not talking about OTel, you'll find him chasing after his energetic 3-year-old son.
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How manual OTel instrumentation saves more than just money
Many companies that have reached a mature observability practice continue to rely on auto-instrumentation, often without realizing it’s quietly draining their budgets. At this stage, observability engineers start spending countless hours chasing down cost anomalies, unaware that the problem may lie not in how much they collect, but what they collect.
What if the key to a more efficient telemetry pipeline lies inside the traces themselves?
In this talk, we will show how manual instrumentation can deliver leaner and more business-oriented telemetry. By comparing traces produced through automatic and manual instrumentation, it will be demonstrated how controlling spans and their attributes can cut data volume by up to 60%, reducing resource overhead and storage costs while improving signal-to-noise ratio.
Attendees will learn the do’s and don’ts of span and attribute management, how to identify unnecessary telemetry metadata, and practical steps to achieve higher observability efficiency.
How to Use the OpenTelemetry Demo and Why It Matters
The "Astronomy Shop," better known as the OpenTelemetry Demo is more than a microservices-based distributed system—it’s the proving ground for OpenTelemetry, widely used by vendors in the OTel ecosystem to showcase their solutions. It demonstrates how to apply OpenTelemetry in a real-world scenario, from instrumenting applications to configuring the OpenTelemetry Collector to tie everything together.
The Demo shouldn't be used only by vendors though, it can also be used by you, either you are a newcomer to OpenTelemetry, a maintainer in any SIG or an experienced user considering an observability backend migration, the Demo can make your life easier and help you do your job better.
Join this talk to discover how the OpenTelemetry Demo can empower you by providing the tools and data you need to leverage OpenTelemetry!
OpenFeature as a Control Plane for OpenTelemetry
Most observability configurations are static. We decide upfront which spans to emit, which attributes to record, and how much telemetry is worth collecting. But production systems are not static. When everything is healthy, detailed telemetry creates unnecessary cost and noise. When incidents happen, the telemetry we need often is not being collected.
What if telemetry verbosity could adapt automatically?
In this talk, we combine OpenTelemetry and OpenFeature to dynamically control instrumentation at runtime. Services can switch between lightweight traces and deep diagnostic telemetry without redeployments or restarts. Feature flags drive observability decisions based on runtime conditions, enabling richer spans, additional attributes, and higher-cardinality signals only when they are needed.
We will demonstrate how OpenTelemetry semantic conventions can act as a standardized control surface, enabling adaptive and vendor-neutral observability across services and environments.
Sample Smarter, Not Harder (Or Not At All!)
Think sampling is just about reducing your vendor bill? Think again! The truth is, the cost of telemetry starts way before it reaches your backend. It starts inside the application process itself, and increases the farther it goes before it’s sampled in your OTel Collector or backend.
In this session, we reframe sampling as a performance and cost strategy that spans the entire telemetry pipeline. We start with application-level overhead and see how different language SDKs can impact performance, and why sometimes the answer isn’t better sampling; it’s not instrumenting at all.
We’ll use the OTel demo app, Astronomy Shop, as our live environment to explore the sampling decision hierarchy, including declarative config to drop known-noisy signals, when to use head- or tail-based sampling, probabilistic sampling, and more.
Join our talk to connect business outcomes to concrete instrumentation and configuration decisions, and for an honest take on where sampling helps and where it doesn’t.
Smells Like Clean Telemetry: Stop the Noise, Create Better Spans
You’ve heard about OpenTelemetry, and now it’s time to give it a shot. Instrumenting your services was easy—until it wasn’t. You got some traces flowing into your observability backend, but as soon as you started adding custom spans and attributes, the real questions began.
Should you create spans for every single method/function in your code? Is more always better? What attributes should you add to your spans? Maybe include full JSON payloads, or go all out and add a whole PDF as an attribute? (Spoiler: don’t.)
Join Juliano in this talk to learn best practices for customizing your application instrumentation with OpenTelemetry. Discover how to make the most of your telemetry while ensuring usability, cost efficiency, and performance. Whether you're just starting out or fine-tuning your instrumentation, this session will help you get to the right balance, avoid costly mistakes, and walk away with clear strategies to get the most out of your telemetry.
What OpenTelemetry Users Taught Us About Developer Experience
What is Developer Experience to you?
For the OpenTelemetry Developer Experience SIG, the initial answer seemed obvious: better SDK configuration, clearer API usage, and smoother onboarding. But when we asked the community what they were struggling with, we actually discovered that our assumptions were only part of the story.
Users already knew how to get started. What they needed was help getting to production.
They wanted real use cases, production-ready examples, Collector deployment patterns, and scaling guidance. In response, the SIG began interviewing companies of different sizes and publishing their production OTel stories, including examples from Mastodon, Adobe, Skyscanner, and others.
In this talk, we will share how our understanding of developer experience changed through surveys, interviews, and community feedback. We will highlight lessons from real-world OTel adoption: what teams are doing well, where they still struggle, and which patterns are emerging across different environments.
Join us to learn what comes next for the DevEx SIG and how real production stories can shape the future of OpenTelemetry developer experience.
Cloud Native Denmark 2026 Sessionize Event Upcoming
KCD Porto x DevOps Days Portugal 2026 Sessionize Event Upcoming
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026 Sessionize Event Upcoming
Observability Summit Europe 2026 Sessionize Event
KCD São Paulo 2026 Sessionize Event
DevOpsDays Graz 2026
Lessons from Years of the OpenTelemetry Demo
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 Sessionize Event
SREday Paris
Crash-Proofing Your OpenTelemetry Collector
KCD Porto 2025 Sessionize Event
KCD Warsaw 2025 Sessionize Event
Cloud Native Denmark 2025 Sessionize Event
ContainerDays Conference 2025 Sessionize Event
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