The OpenTelemetry project offers a bright future of observability, offering a comprehensive and standardized solution for surfacing, collecting, and reporting telemetry signals from your systems. While the future (and present) may be bright, integrating OpenTelemetry into existing libraries, applications, and systems can be an enormous challenge. From home-grown logging frameworks, vendor-specific APIs, and missing data, it can seem overwhelming to get started.

In this talk, we'll cover the building blocks of OpenTelemetry and how various platforms have integrated them. We'll also look at the motivations and benefits of moving to OpenTelemetry in a brownfield setting. Additionally, we'll examine the various strategies for integrating OpenTelemetry into existing applications.

Finally, I'll share my experiences of introducing and deploying OpenTelemetry solutions into brownfield systems, from code to production.