So you finally got your organization to invest in OpenTelemetry. You carefully evaluated observability backends and picked the perfect one. Everything is awesome. Then twelve months later, your costs have skyrocketed and you can’t explain why. What happened? This talk examines how to emit meaningful telemetry while keeping costs under control, by exploring the following: - What to actually instrument - Which metrics to focus on - Pipeline efficiency with OTel Arrow Applying sampling, filtering, and intentional instrumentation to cut down on noise Schema management and validation with tools like Weaver We’ll review the ingredients of a mature observability implementation with OpenTelemetry: one that grows with you instead of overwhelming you. You’ll learn how to apply cost-effective techniques to achieve meaningful observability. Speaker Notes (visible to organizers only) As more organizations embrace OpenTelemetry and mature their Observability practice, we find ourselves coming out of that Observability and OpenTelemetry "honeymoon period". We've gone from, “We’re using OpenTelemetry, therefore we have Observability” to "How do we actually make this work for us?" This talk will equip organizations to build a sustainable and long-lasting observability practice built on OpenTelemetry.
Josh Lee is an Open Source Advocate at Altinity, focused on ClickHouse, Kubernetes, and OpenTelemetry. With more than 20 years of software engineering experience, he has worked across developer advocacy, product management, observability, and full stack development. Josh is also an organizer of the Open Source Analytics Conference and a frequent speaker in the cloud native and observability community.
