Hands on with OpenTelemetry

Presented by: Nočnica Mellifera

OpenTelemetry is the 'wave of the future' for observability, but is it ready for your team? Yes! In a few hours we'll instrument a demo application and see what OpenTelmetry can do. We'll also cover basic data filtering and compression, and how to see our first visualizations

### OpenTelemetry

* History
* What's in the project - data backend, vizualization and queries are not part of OTel
* Use cases - can help almost anyone
* Status of development - Logs support is still growing, but you can send logs through the collector

### Where to send data

* Closed source SaaS backends
* issues with OTel data being a 'second class citizen'
* data in, but not data out
* Prometheus/Grafana
* Loki
* SigNoz/ClickHouse

### Collector Design

* Most basic - direct from SDK to datastore, don't do this
* Single collector
* Collector -> collector
* Daemonset in Kubernetes (I promise you don't need to know Kubernetes to follow this talk!)

### Sample Application

* Basic data emitter from the CLI
* Auto-instrumentation with the language-appropriate SDK
* Configuring data sends
* A basic dashboard

### Configuring the Collector

* YAML config
* restarting the collector

### OpenTelemetry Processors - config

* batching - reducing sends
* parsing - finding data early
* crushing cardinality - getting the data you need
* filtering - removing sensitive data
* transforming with OTTL

Tags: DevOps, Observability, QA TestingLevel: Intermediate