2025-11-22 –, Plenary Space
Ever had your app crash at the worst moment, during checkout or a key transaction internally? When that happens, users leave fast. Behind each crash is a bigger story: alerts firing, teams scrambling, and no clear root cause. Modern systems are fast, complex, and full of hidden failure points. One small change can ripple through the entire system in seconds. Observability is the cornerstone of reliable systems. It allows teams to identify and debug issues before they impact a broader group of users. Yet building an ideal observability stack is far from easy. It requires time and effort - instrumenting every app, service, and component to emit telemetry data.
This talk frames observability not as an ops task but as an engineering discipline. Built on open standards like OpenTelemetry, it avoids vendor lock-in and puts control back in the developer’s hands. You’ll learn how to instrument Python apps, build cost-effective telemetry pipelines, and export data for analysis - without falling into any compliance pitfalls. It's not just about logs, metrics, or traces - the goal is to extract clear business value from every signal and every dollar spent. By aligning observability with outcomes, we create an adaptive, efficient, and cost-aware setup. Whether you're just starting out or operating at scale, you'll see how adopting open standards can turn observability into a strategic asset instead of a liability.
Key topics:
The evolution of observability and why it has become essential over the past few decades.
A deep dive into core telemetry signals: Logs, Metrics, and Traces.
The challenges developers face with modern observability, and how adopting OpenTelemetry can address these issues.
A comparison between traditional approaches and the OpenTelemetry method, focusing on everything from easy Python code instrumentation to advanced data processing and seamless telemetry export to any observability backend—without vendor lock-in.
Different sampling techniques like head, tail, probabilistic, allow you to have full control over the data you ingest and its associated costs with different setup strategies.
Best practices at the OpenTelemetry Collector level that helps towards reducing observability costs and redact sensitive data - all using telemetry pipelines.
Getting started with OpenTelemetry, including a live code demo.
Future of AI in the of open-source observability and few ongoing work on OpenTelemetry with eBPF.
Beginner
Yash is a software engineer and researcher with a deep interest in distributed systems. His focus is on observability, an areas where he constantly seeks new insights. As an active advocate of OpenTelemetry, Yash contributes to both the project and the wider community. Outside of tech, he’s an explorer, whether in the kitchen experimenting with new recipes or traveling the world to taste diverse cuisines.