Adopting OpenTelemetry might look easy at first, change some YAML, deploy a collector and you're done, but once you operate as scale your fears become reality, defaults are no longer applicable, integrations no longer work and configuration alone will not get you where you want to be.

I will present how we developed an observability stack around OpenTelemetry, the challenges we faced and how we overcame them by building custom components.

This talk is not only about OpenTelemetry, it's about the importance of understanding the tools you use in production. Open projects like OpenTelemetry don't exist to perfectly fit every use case out of the box, treating them as drop in solutions leads to frustration while treating them as the foundation of something bigger unlocks their true power.