Virtual Rejekts 2020

Observable Applications Using OpenTelemetry
04-01, 17:35–18:05 (UTC), Track 1 (UTC)

OpenTelemetry is a CNCF sandbox project which standardizes application tracing and monitoring across multiple programming languages, protocols, platforms and vendors. In this talk I'll provide a brief introduction to the OpenTelemetry project, explore some of its language libraries, demonstrate how they can be used to make distributed applications observable and look into some of the tricky parts in implementing distributed tracing as well as how they are handled by OpenTelemetry.


Following are the key topics covered in the talk:

  • Tracing vs. traditional monitoring and logging
  • Distributed tracing: what makes it great and why it is hard
  • Introduction to OpenTelemetry
  • A look into some of the OpenTelemetry libraries (most likely Go and Python)
  • Demo: making a distributed application observable using OpenTelemetry
  • Context propagation: what makes it tricky and how it is handled in the OpenTelemetry implementation

A software engineer with a background in network communication and music. Working on open-source software at Kinvolk since 2018 with a focus on Kubernetes and other cloud-native technologies.