OTel Community Day North America 2024

Using OpenTelemetry for frontend observability is a challenge, given that client-side applications are dynamic and have unpredictable user interactions. While leveraging OTel for server-based systems is relatively mature at this point, there is a lot of innovation needed in the collection of user experience telemetry. And the most complex client-side environment of all is mobile apps. Did you know there are data and lifecycle modeling challenges in architecting a mobile observability SDK using OTel? For example, user experiences span multiple foreground and background sessions, and mobile applications must account for changes in memory, CPU, battery, connectivity, and app state, to name a few. Where should mutable state versus static data be stored? And does it even make sense to model an entire app session as a single trace? In this talk, you’ll learn how Embrace rebuilt their native Android and iOS SDKs to OpenTelemetry standards, including challenges, solutions, and thoughts on how OTel can better capture the telemetry needs of increasingly dynamic client-side environments.