Shift Into an Observability Mindset with OpenTelemetry
Year: 2024
Labels: observability, opentelemetry
Shift Into an Observability Mindset with OpenTelemetry
Speaker(s): Daniel Gomez Blanco
Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0AorR5JUS8
Summary: This talk is about explaining that in today’s complex, distributed systems you can no longer debug by intuition and isolated metrics alone - you need rich, standards-based context propagated end‐to‐end. By adopting OpenTelemetry’s unified model for metrics, traces and logs, teams gain data ("evidence") instead of guesswork and can correlate user experience across services.
Timestamps
00:00
- Introduction to the Talk and Speaker02:10
- Debuggning without context makes it difficult to connect the dots04:00
- With context and correlation we have evidence and everyone can be on the same page06:30
- Trace Sampling (Head / Tail) allows to only keep the most useful data09:30
- Use each signal of your telemetry data for its intended purpose (Metrics vs Traces vs Logs)12:30
- Metric Views to control metric streams14:00
- Communicate value to the Leadership17:05
- Change the engineer mindset for cross-organisation alignment20:30
- Takeaway points
Key Takeaways
- By propagating OpenTelemetry’s trace context end-to-end we get concrete evidence rather than relying on hunches when debugging.
- Leverage metrics, traces, and logs for their intended purposes but also correlate them via exemplars and semantic conventions.
- Use head sampling for low-overhead probabilistic trace capture, and tail sampling (via a collector) to focus on the most interesting traces (errors, high-latency) without losing end-to-end context.
- Keep metrics cardinality low and use “metric views” at runtime to reshape or filter out unbounded labels, ensuring performant long-term storage and querying.
- Use telemetry to prove ROI and guide leadership decisions by tying service-level indicators (SLIs/SLOs) back to real user-experience and business KPIs.
- We learn by doing so it's a good idea to guide engineers to adoption through live labs or “observability game days,” making it easy—and fun—for to experience the value of context-driven debugging.
Questions/Discussion Points
- Easy talk to follow along, kind of like an overview/intro to OpenTelemetry’s APIs and SDKs. I would say the recommended audience is Platform/SRE/DevOps engineers who want to move from ad-hoc metrics to a unified, standards-based approach - or engineering leads/architects looking to align multiple teams around a common telemetry model.