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.