Are you interested in dipping your toes in the cloud native observability waters, but as an engineer you are not sure where to get started with tracing your microservices and applications on Kubernetes? Then this is the session for you, where we take you on your first steps in an active open-source project that offers a buffet of opportunities for getting started with telemetry data. The project, openTelemetry (OTEL), is where we start with de-mystifying key concepts and terms such as observability, telemetry, instrumentation to lay a foundation. Then we’ll explore the OTEL community and how to become not only an end-user, but possibly a contributor.We will wrap up with an overview of the components in this project, such as the Collector, the OTEL protocol (OTLP), its APIs, and its SDKs. Attendees will leave with an understanding of key observability concepts in distributed tracing! Key takeaways: Open source, vendor neutral instrumentation is an exciting new reality as the industry standardizes on openTelemetry for observability. OpenTelemetry is on a mission to enable effective observability by making high-quality, portable telemetry ubiquitous. The world of observability and monitoring today has a steep learning curve and in order to achieve ubiquity, the project would benefit from growing our contributor community.

1. Observability For
You and Me with
OpenTelemetry
Eric D. Schabell
Director Evangelism
@ericschabell{@fosstodon.org}
14 Nov 2023
KCD Denmark

2. chronosphere.io
Cloud Native O11y (at scale)
Nuts & Bolts of OpenTelemetry
Getting Your Feet Wet

3. chronosphere.io
Cloud Native Observability at Scale

4. chronosphere.io
Cloud Native

5. chronosphere.io
Data volume
Experiment:
- Hello World app on 4 node
Kubernetes cluster with Tracing,
End User Metrics (EUM), Logs,
Metrics (containers / nodes)
- 30 days == +450 GB

6. chronosphere.io
Retention
Retention
Retention
Retention
Retention
Retention
Retention

7. chronosphere.io
Cloud Native at Scale

8. chronosphere.io
Simple O11y

9. chronosphere.io
O11y at Scale (over time…)

10. chronosphere.io
“It’s remarkable how common this
situation is, where an organization
is paying more for their
observability data, than they do
for their production
infrastructure.”
?

11. chronosphere.io
O11y at Scale (need)

12. chronosphere.io
Telemetry is automatically collecting, transmitting
and measuring data from remote sources. It
transmits data back to a central location and
analyzes to monitor and control remote systems.

13. chronosphere.io
Nuts & Bolts of
OpenTelemetry

14. chronosphere.io
https://opentelemetry.io

15. chronosphere.io
OpenTelemetry is not an
observability back-end.

16. chronosphere.io
Traces give us the big picture and understanding
the full path a request takes in your application.
Spans represents a unit of work or operation and
are building blocks of traces.

17. chronosphere.io
● API - generating & correlating tracing data
● SDK - language specific impl
● Data - OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP)
Specification

18. chronosphere.io
Applications (Java)
OTel Auto Instrumentation (libraries)
OTel API
OTel SDK
OTel Collector
OTLP
OTLP
OTLP
(Auto) instrumentation

19. chronosphere.io
Host
Observability Backend
(Prometheus, Jaeger, Fluent Bit, etc.),
Applications
OTel Auto Instrumentation
OTel API
OTel SDK
OTel Collector Agent
OTLP
OTLP
OTLP
OTLP
OTLP
Collector (agent)

20. chronosphere.io
Host
Host
Host
Observability Backend
(Prometheus, Jaeger, Fluent Bit, etc.),
Applications
OTel Auto Instrumentation
OTel API
OTel SDK
OTel Collector Agent
OTLP
OTLP
OTLP
OTLP
Collector (gateway)
OTel Collector Gateway

21. chronosphere.io
Observability Backend
(Prometheus, Jaeger, Fluent Bit, etc.),
OTel Collector
OTLP
Telemetry
(Spans)
Collector (internals)
Receiver Processor Exporter

22. chronosphere.io
Spans and Traces

23. chronosphere.io
Kubernetes Operator
Collector
Auto-instrumentation
Collector
Auto-instrumentation
Collector
Auto-instrumentation
Collector
Auto-instrumentation

24. chronosphere.io
Getting Your Feet Wet

25. chronosphere.io
CNCF - cloud-native.slack.com

26. chronosphere.io
Special Interest Groups

27. chronosphere.io
CNCF - End User Community

28. Questions?
Eric D. Schabell
Director Evangelism
@ericschabell{@fosstodon.org}