OTel Community Day North America 2024: Full Schedule

In Person
June 25, 2024
Learn more and Register to Attend

Please note: This schedule is automatically displayed in Pacific Daylight Time (UTC -7). To see the schedule in your preferred timezone, please select from the drop-down menu to the right, above "Filter by Date." The schedule is subject to change.

9:00am PDT

Welcome + Opening Remarks - Austin Parker, OTel Community Day Event Chair

Speakers

Austin Parker

Director, Open Source, Honeycomb

Tuesday June 25, 2024 9:00am - 9:15am PDT
TBA

Opening + Closing Remarks

9:20am PDT

PANEL: OpenTelemetry Governance Panel - Reese Lee, New Relic; Juraci Paixao Krohling, Grafana Labs; Alolita Sharma, Apple; Daniel Dyla, Dynatrace

Speakers

Daniel Dyla

Senior Open Source Architect, Dynatrace

Daniel joined Dynatrace in 2015 working on the Davis Assistant natural language interface to the Dynatrace AI. Daniel is now an Open Source Architect, member of the W3C Distributed Tracing Working Group where he contributes to the Trace Context and Baggage specifications, OpenTelemetry... Read More →

Reese Lee

Senior Developer Relations Engineer, New Relic

Reese Lee is a Senior Developer Relations Engineer at New Relic, where she is focused on enabling customers and colleagues on OSS via workshops, blog posts, and documentation. She enjoys figuring out solutions to technical problems, learning about interesting user stories and use... Read More →

Alolita Sharma

AIML Observability Engineering, Apple

Alolita Sharma is a member of OpenTelemetry GC, CNCF Observability TAG co-chair and CNCF Governing Board member from Apple. She leads Apple’s AIML observability teams. She contributes to open source, open standards at OpenTelemetry, O11y Query Language standard, Unicode, W3C. She... Read More →

Juraci Paixao Krohling

Tuesday June 25, 2024 9:20am - 9:55am PDT
TBA

Panels

10:00am PDT

How OpenTelemetry Helps Generative AI - Phillip Carter, Honeycomb

Generative AI has taken the industry by storm. Like it or not, it's here to stay, people are finding use for it, companies are building with it, and it needs help. The biggest challenge with Generative AI is that you can't debug it by stepping through code like you can "normal" software. So, how do you understand when it's working well, when it's not working well, and how to improve it? Observability! In this talk, we'll cover at a high level the problems that Generative AI introduces in production, why Observability matters, and some high level tips for how you can use OpenTelemetry to make progress with this tech. Finally, we'll make mention of the LLMs Semantic Conventions WG and how folks can engage.

Speakers

Phillip Carter

Honeycomb

Phillip is on the product team at Honeycomb where he works on a bunch of different things, including spearheading Honeycomb's AI efforts. He's an OpenTelemetry maintainer -- chances are if you've read the docs to learn how to use OTel, you've read his words. In a past life, he worked... Read More →

Tuesday June 25, 2024 10:00am - 10:15am PDT
TBA

Interesting and Unexpected OpenTelemetry Use Cases

10:30am PDT

Using Native OpenTelemetry Instrumentation to Make Client Libraries Better - Liudmila Molkova, Microsoft

We usually think about observability as a feature intended for application developers. Client library authors provide observability as an afterthought to improve developer experience and reduce support burden. But native instrumentation intended for end users is extremely valuable for library authors as well during development process. In this session I will show how we leverage native instrumentation when stress and load testing Azure client libraries and how it helps us optimize performance, detect and fix reliability issues. I'll provide a few examples of such issues we were able to detect: the unnecessary HTTP requests we could avoid, transient issues we didn't retry, memory we over-allocated, thread pools we didn't configure. Client library authors don't usually have expertise in observability. I'll show how stress testing helps us bridge this gap and find good observability signals for the end users and ourselves.

Speakers

Liudmila Molkova

Microsoft

Liudmila Molkova is a Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft working on observability and Azure client libraries. She is a co-author of distributed tracing implementations across the .NET ecosystem including HTTP client instrumentation and Azure Functions. Liudmila is an active... Read More →

Tuesday June 25, 2024 10:30am - 10:45am PDT
TBA

Interesting and Unexpected OpenTelemetry Use Cases

10:50am PDT

Tuning OTel Collector Performance Through Profiling - Braydon Kains, Google

As excitement mounts for the newest OpenTelemetry signal, I want to demonstrate the power of profiling by leveraging it on something right in our own backyard: the OpenTelemetry Collector! In this talk I will go over some examples of how I used profiling to discover OpenTelemetry Collector performance and resource usage problems, along with tips on reading the profiles and how you can start using profiling to find similar issues yourself.

Speakers

Braydon Kains

Google

Braydon is a software developer at Google Cloud working on the Ops Agent. Under the GitHub username @braydonk you can find his contributions in Fluent Bit, OpenTelemetry repos, and various auxiliary repos. He is also the creator and maintainer of the yamlfmt tool.

Tuesday June 25, 2024 10:50am - 11:05am PDT
TBA

OpenTelemetry Tips and Tricks

11:05am PDT

Coffee and Networking Break

Tuesday June 25, 2024 11:05am - 11:20am PDT
TBA

Breaks

11:20am PDT

OpenTelemetry for Mobile Apps: Challenges and Opportunities in Data Modeling and API Design - Andrew Tunall & Hanson Ho, Embrace

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.

Speakers

Hanson Ho

Embrace

Hanson was the former Tech Lead of Android Performance and Stability at Twitter, where he spent a lot of time on collecting and interpreting performance data in order to improve the app experience for all Twitter users on all Android devices all around the world. He is now at Embrace... Read More →

Andrew Tunall

Embrace

Andrew leads product, engineering and design at Embrace. He has a wealth of experience in product leadership and building innovative, cloud-scale software. Prior to Embrace he was the VP of Product at New Relic where he built New Relic’s cloud observability practice, including development... Read More →

Tuesday June 25, 2024 11:20am - 11:35am PDT
TBA

Interesting and Unexpected OpenTelemetry Use Cases

11:40am PDT

The "Zen" of Python Exemplars - Paige Cruz, Chronosphere

The Zen of Python states "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it." OpenTelemetry is the obvious choice for traces but bad news for Pythonistas when it comes to metrics because both Prometheus and OpenTelemetry offer compelling choices. Let's look at all of the ways you can tie metrics and traces together with exemplars whether you're working with OTel metrics, Prom metrics, Prom-turned-OTel metrics, or OTel-turned-Prom metrics!

Speakers

Paige Cruz

Chronosphere

Paige Cruz is a Senior Developer Advocate at Chronosphere passionate about cultivating sustainable on-call practices and bringing folks their aha moment with observability. She started as a software engineer at New Relic before switching to Site Reliability Engineering holding the... Read More →

Tuesday June 25, 2024 11:40am - 11:55am PDT
TBA

OpenTelemetry Tips and Tricks

12:00pm PDT

Telemetry Over Events: Developer-Friendly Instrumentation at American Express Mobile - Ace Ellett & Kylan Johnson, American Express

The American Express mobile apps support many customer journeys, in many different markets, implemented by many disparate developer teams. That complexity makes it extremely difficult to develop consistent instrumentation throughout the applications. After testing out numerous tools, none of which seemed to fit right, the Mobile SRE team reframed the problem—focusing on the developer perspective— and developed an event-based telemetry pattern that greatly reduces the cognitive load on developers during instrumentation implementation. This talk will show how the Mobile SRE team rearchitected their instrumentation platform in a way that allows feature developers to communicate their business logic, without having to be an expert in any particular instrumentation technology. The team will demonstrate how an event framework can be placed in front of a framework like OpenTelemetry to streamline development. And finally, we’ll present how our codebases became cleaner, easier to reason about, and more testable as a result of this pattern.

Speakers

Ace Ellett

American Express

Ace is the iOS Lead on the Mobile SRE team at American Express. He lives in Phoenix, AZ with his wife and two dogs. When he's not trying to measure all the things in the Amex mobile apps, he's probably thinking about board games and escape rooms.

Kylan Johnson

Senior Android Engineer, American Express

Kylan has been working on Android for over 12 years (that just means he knows where he was when Honeycomb came out). He started at Amex as a feature developer on American Express's flagship mobile app when both Android and IOS teams could fit in one room. About 5 years ago, he... Read More →

Tuesday June 25, 2024 12:00pm - 12:15pm PDT
TBA

Managing OpenTelemetry

12:15pm PDT

Lunch Break

Tuesday June 25, 2024 12:15pm - 1:15pm PDT
TBA

Breaks

1:15pm PDT

Implement auto instrumentation under GraalVM static compilation on OTel Java Agent - Zihao Rao & Huxing Zhang, Alibaba

GraalVM static compilation has a significant effect on improving Java application startup speed and runtime memory usage. It is very valuable for the Java to flourish in Cloud Native ecosystem. However, the automatic instrumentation originally provided based on Java Agent will become invalid after static compilation. We designed a static instrumentation solution in GraalVM to solve above problem. This speech will introduce the overall design idea of the solution and related test results in OTel Java Agent.

Speakers

Huxing Zhang

Software Engineer, Alibaba

Huxing Zhang is a software engineer of Alibaba Inc., and is a core maintainer of Tomcat in Alibaba. Huxing is also an active contributor of Apache Tomcat since 2014, and becomes a committer of Apache Tomcat in 2016.

Zihao Rao

Software Engineer, Alibaba

Zihao is a software engineer at Alibaba Cloud. Over the past few years, he has participated in several well-known open source projects, he is steering committee member of Spring Cloud Alibaba project, and is a triager for OpenTelemetry Java Instrumentation now.

Tuesday June 25, 2024 1:15pm - 1:30pm PDT
TBA

Interesting and Unexpected OpenTelemetry Use Cases

1:35pm PDT

PANEL: OpenTelemetry Technical Committee Panel - Josh Suereth, Google; Reiley Yang, Microsoft; Rynn Mancuso , Honeycomb.io; Jack Berg, New Relic

Speakers

Jack Berg

Josh Suereth

Staff software engineer, Google

Rynn Mancuso

Reiley Yang

Tuesday June 25, 2024 1:35pm - 2:10pm PDT
TBA

Panels

2:15pm PDT

Time Matters: Choosing Between Delta and Cumulative Metric Temporalities for Effective Monitoring - Tom Braack, Grafana Labs

You can send OTel metrics over the wire using delta or cumulative temporality, but few users fully understand the respective implications on the robustness and correctness of their data. In this talk Tom draws from his first-hand experience in building the OpenTelemetry Collector’s delta-to-cumulative processor, out of the quick wins around converting Sums up to the more nuanced discussions about histograms. He will highlight the difference between the two aggregations before delving into the intricate effects of either on precision, accuracy, statefulness and operational consequences when interacting with the wider cloud-native observability ecosystem. Finally, he will showcase options and tradeoffs when converting temporalities in the OpenTelemetry collector. By the end of this talk, you will be able to pick which strategy suits your own observability needs and specific architecture best.

Speakers

Tom Braack

Grafana Labs

Tom is a Software Engineer at Grafana Labs, contributing to the OpenTelemetry Collector and to Prometheus. He draws experience from a strong cloud-native background, having created Grafana Tanka, an open-source tool for scalable Kubernetes config management before. Tom studies at... Read More →

Tuesday June 25, 2024 2:15pm - 2:30pm PDT
TBA

OpenTelemetry Tips and Tricks

2:35pm PDT

Fine-Tuning Auto-Instrumentation - Jamie Danielson, Honeycomb

Automatic instrumentation is a great way to get started in any observability journey. For many, the telemetry gleaned from these libraries is enough to cover the majority of important use cases. But while everything may be covered in these libraries, there is also a lot included that may not be needed or desired. At that point it’s important to understand how to fine-tune the instrumentation based on configuration options available. Attendees will get a run-through of common instrumentation configurations available in most auto-instrumentation libraries, with some practical use cases and common recommendations.

Speakers

Jamie Danielson

Honeycomb

Jamie is a Senior Software Engineer at Honeycomb where she works on instrumentation libraries. She is an active contributor to multiple OpenTelemetry projects, and is an approver for OpenTelemetry JavaScript. When she’s not working she’s playing dek hockey.

Tuesday June 25, 2024 2:35pm - 2:50pm PDT
TBA

OpenTelemetry Tips and Tricks

2:55pm PDT

Behind the Code: Design Choices in OpenTelemetry .NET Metrics API and SDK - Cijo Thomas & Utkarsh Umesan Pillai, Microsoft

In the field of observability, metrics play a key role in monitoring system behavior and identifying potential issues. A reliable, high-performing, and always-running Metrics SDK is essential for monitoring the health of software systems. This session will explore the OpenTelemetry .NET Metrics SDK, highlighting its design principles aimed at performance, predictable and bounded memory usage, and memory efficiency. We will delve into the engineering challenges faced by the team and the various design trade-offs considered. We'll briefly cover performance testing techniques. A notable feature of the SDK is its ability to record measurements in as low as 10 nanoseconds, and up to just a few hundred nanoseconds, all with zero heap allocation. Moreover, the SDK includes memory limit safeguards to ensure bounded memory usage, regardless of the input, thereby ensuring that the telemetry system itself does not become an attack vector for security threats. Join us for an overview of how OpenTelemetry .NET Metrics strives to meet its performance and efficiency objectives. We'll conclude the session with actionable insights for end-users to effectively use OpenTelemetry .NET Metrics!

Speakers

Utkarsh Umesan Pillai

Microsoft Corporation

Active contributor and one of the maintainers of OpenTelemetry .NET

Cijo Thomas

Microsoft

Cijo is a Software Engineer at Microsoft focusing on Observability systems and telemetry collection. He is a maintainer for OpenTelemetry .NET and Rust clients.

Tuesday June 25, 2024 2:55pm - 3:10pm PDT
TBA

OpenTelemetry Tips and Tricks

3:10pm PDT

Coffee and Networking Break

Tuesday June 25, 2024 3:10pm - 3:30pm PDT
TBA

Breaks

3:30pm PDT

Breaking the Chain of Blame: How to Get True Test Observability? - Ken Hamric, Tracetest.io

Debugging problems in a distributed system can be hard. Finding the root cause of the problem and assigning the work to a specific team after a test failure can be challenging and time-consuming. Front-end and API tests tell you there is a problem, but not the root cause or which team is responsible. Imagine if you could see exactly what happened, step-by-step, during an end-to-end test by combining your favorite end-to-end testing tool, Cypress or Playwright, with distributed traces. You would gain visibility across your entire distributed system, including both the front end and back end. With this added observability as a part of every end to end test, you no longer have to guess what occurred, what the cause of an error is, or struggle to find the team that can correct the issue. I will present how to use distributed traces to visualize a defined code path and use it as part of a Playwright end-to-end test.

Speakers

Ken Hamric

Tracetest.io

Ken has been a developer for 35 years and has founded multiple tech startups, including CrossBrowserTesting.com and his latest open source project, Tracetest.io. Tracetest allows you to build deep integration tests graphically via your OpenTelemetry based traces.

Tuesday June 25, 2024 3:30pm - 3:45pm PDT
TBA

Interesting and Unexpected OpenTelemetry Use Cases

3:50pm PDT

Managing Observability Data at the Edge with the OpenTelemetry Collector and OTTL - Evan Bradley, Dynatrace

When the proliferation of observability data sources, formats, and payload sizes becomes too much to handle in a single location, it might be time to consider processing at the edge. Working with data close to its origins enables you to exercise data governance, filter for cost-reduction, transform data before shipping it to your backend, and scale your data pipelines. The OpenTelemetry Collector can be deployed to nearly any environment to help address these use-cases. In addition to supporting a long list of ingest and output data formats, it allows you to apply operations on a stream of data using the OpenTelemetry Transformation Language (OTTL). Come learn how to use OTTL to transform, filter, route, and sample your data, and hear about some new OTTL features that help enable these operations.

Speakers

Evan Bradley

Dynatrace

Evan helps maintain the OpenTelemetry Collector, where he is a primary contributor to the OpenTelemetry Transformation Language (OTTL), and helps drive adoption of the OpenTelemetry Agent Management Protocol (OpAMP) to enable users to manage fleets of Collectors. Evan has a background... Read More →

Tuesday June 25, 2024 3:50pm - 4:05pm PDT
TBA

OpenTelemetry Tips and Tricks

4:10pm PDT

What Could Go Wrong with a GraphQL Query and Can OpenTelemetry Help? - Budhaditya Bhattacharya, Tyk

APIs are the building blocks of our modern world. As the world becomes more interconnected, we need reliable and performant APIs to ensure the best experience for our end users. Many developers are starting to use GraphQL to provide a monolithic facade on top of their complex microservice architecture. In turn, making their next-generation APIs fast, flexible, and developer-friendly. However, using GraphQL also introduces many new challenges when isolating failures and troubleshooting performance issues. Can OpenTelemetry help solve those challenges? During this talk, we will: 1. Give a brief overview of OpenTelemetry as a technology 2. Investigate common challenges developers and SREs might encounter when running & monitoring GraphQL in production (ft. the RED method) 3. Explore how OpenTelemetry can help deal with these issues 4. Discuss what needs to be improved to make OTel even more valuable for the GraphQL community

Speakers

Budhaditya Bhattacharya

Developer Advocate, Tyk

Budha is a Developer Advocate at Tyk responsible for product education, community engagement, and open-source ecosystem expansion. He is the co-creator of the API platform maturity model, course instructor of the API platform engineering fundamentals program, host of the All About... Read More →

Tuesday June 25, 2024 4:10pm - 4:25pm PDT
TBA

Interesting and Unexpected OpenTelemetry Use Cases

4:30pm PDT

Closing Remarks - Austin Parker, OTel Community Day Event Chair

Tuesday June 25, 2024 4:30pm - 4:45pm PDT
TBA

Opening + Closing Remarks