An app without built-in observability is like a baby: it cries sometimes, and you have to guess what is wrong.

The open-source community has been working on the equivalent of baby sign-language: teach your app to talk to you, without baking in any particular vendor.

It’s called OpenTelemetry, brought to you by the CNCF (Cloud Native Compute Foundation), and it’s their second biggest project after Kubernetes. In this talk, learn what you need to know to turn this to your advantage: event-based observability with distributed tracing, how it works, and what you miracles you can do with it.

Let your apps grow into complex teens while still talking to you, without committing to a single vendor-specific language. Employ complexity to deliver value, while still understanding what’s happening in the system, at need.