In today's fast-paced world, ensuring the reliability of your Java applications is critical. But how do you effectively identify and resolve production issues before they escalate? 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 more specifically, OpenTelemetry.

In this session, I'll take you behind the scenes of several production problems I've solved using OpenTelemetry. You'll learn how I uncovered critical problems that were invisible without the right telemetry data - and how you can do the same. From tracking down elusive bugs with traces to uncovering system bottlenecks with metrics, OpenTelemetry provides the tools you need to truly understand what's happening in your application in real time.

A key concept in all this are traces, especially in microservices landscapes. Architecture diagrams often don't tell the whole story. I'll show you how these traces can help you build a service graph and save you hours in a crisis. A service graph gives you the overview and helps you to pinpoint where to look for problems.

Whether you're new to observability or an experienced professional, this session will give you the practical insights and tools (like Grafana) to dramatically improve the observability of your application - and change the way you handle production issues. Solving problems is much easier when you have 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.