When Things Go Sideways: Troubleshooting the OpenTelemetry Operator
11-11, 15:10–15:40 (MST), Theater

The OpenTelemetry (OTel) Operator is a great tool that helps make your life a little easier by managing OTel for you in your Kubernetes cluster, by:
Managing the deployment of the OpenTelemetry Collector
Managing the configuration of a fleet of OpenTelemetry Collectors via OpAMP integration
Injecting and configuring auto-instrumentation into your pods

But what happens when THINGS. DON’T. WORK??

In this talk, Adriana and Reese will cover:
* An overview of the OTel Operator
* Common installation issues
* Common auto-instrumentation issues
* Common OTel Collector deployment issues
* …and how to tackle them all

Attendees will walk away from this session with a better understanding of how they can leverage the Operator, and be empowered to use it with confidence.


As systems continue to evolve, they bring growing complexity with them: these include complexities in infrastructure and in software architecture. Having observable systems helps engineers manage this complexity. Many organizations rely on Kubernetes to run their software, and running the OpenTelemetry (OTel) Operator can help unlock the power of observability.

Unfortunately, the OTel Operator can seem daunting to the novice user, especially when it doesn’t behave as expected.

In this session, Adriana and Reese will address common gotchas with the OTel Operator and provide solutions for these challenges so that engineers can unlock its potential.

Adriana Villela is a Principal Developer Advocate, helping companies achieve reliability greatness through Observability, SRE, & DevOps practices. Previously, she managed a Platform Engineering team & an Observability Practices team at Tucows. Adriana has worked at various large-scale enterprises, as an individual contributor and leader, including Bank of Montreal, Ceridian, and Accenture. Adriana is a blogger, host of the Geeking Out Podcast, CNCF Ambassador, and HashiCorp Ambassador.