The Science of Signals: Mastering Telemetry for Observability by Alex Van Boxel, Maximilien Richer

Modern software systems are complex beasts. We need the right tools and signals to understand their behavior, performance, and potential problems. There are now so many ways to instrument our software that, as an engineer, it’s hard to pick the correct signal.This talk dives into the science behind telemetry signals like traces, metrics, logs, and profiling data. This knowledge will help you pick the right signal, make informed compromises, and create good data points. It’s also important to know when to use auto instrumentation or when to take over the steering wheel and manually instrument your code.By the end, you'll be equipped to make more informed decisions about which signals to use, when to use them, and how to leverage them in your stack to achieve top-notch observability cost-effectively.In this session, we’ll use the OpenTelemetry Java SDK to support the theory, but this is not an OpenTelemetry talk; we will focus on the why, not the how.