OpenTelemetry 101 - Rob Ashton - NDC London 2021

OpenTelemetry is *the* new (and hot) way to observe your applications in production - both language and platform agnostic, this exciting specification offers the promise of being able to easily observe what your services and dependencies are doing and how they are interacting with each other over time. Being able to embed instrumentation code in third party libraries without tying the user of those libraries to one particular implementation is game-changing as it means it will soon become the norm to build libraries with observability built-in as a first-class citizen. On top of this, Otel provides a common language/framework to integrate with specific implementations such as Nagios, Splunk, Prometheus, Zipkin without having to then write code specific to those systems. In this 101 session we are going to jump right in to explaining the basic concepts and tools available within this ecosystem (both tracing and metrics) why you'd even want such a thing to exist and how to get started with it in your platform(s) of choice. We will witness the use of OpenTelemetry when tracing requests through a distributed system comprised of microservices from initial web request down to database access and demonstrate how it is possible to write code to instrument *everything* whilst deferring decisions about how this data is actually used in production. This is going to be *the* way to bake observability into systems going forwards - get involved!